- iPhone - Reviews Eurogamer is the largest independent gaming website in Europe, providing news, reviews, previews, and more. Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:44:52 +0000 5 Fri, 14 Mar 2014 15:44:52 +0000 Out There review




Read more…

Threes! review

Like so many of the things installed on your iPhone, Threes! is a game of pattern-matching. A one and a two make a three. Threes and up can be matched only with identical tiles. 'Swipe to combine tiles' is all the instruction you really need to get started, and indeed the game offers little more than that as you complete its wonderfully light-touch tutorial sequence. Of course, by then it's too late. It's much too late.

Threes' best joke is that it's a match-two puzzler. It's not a maths game, and despite having numbers everywhere you look, it involves none of that tricky adding-up or taking-away. These numbers are used merely as identifiers. The game could equally have employed colours, or pictures of cats, or smells to identify its pieces. Do not be put off by the pictures of numbers, it is not they that will be making you feel a bit thick.

From the team responsible for the pain-is-pleasure sado-ludism of Puzzlejuice, Threes! is the video game equivalent of one of those hipster restaurants that serves unconscionably delightful food, but insists on doing so in the most terrifyingly smug surroundings imaginable. The brutalist mechanical simplicity of the gameplay is bonded to an audio landscape of shameless hipster whimsy - and if the graphic design loves Letterpress so much, why doesn't it just marry it?

Read more…

]]> Wed, 05 Mar 2014 11:00:00 +0000
The Walking Dead: A House Divided review

Avoiding the spoilers, there's not a vast amount left to say about this second episode of season two of The Walking Dead. It's not that nothing happens, even if it does take a while to; it's because there's at least one big continuation from the 400 Days bridging episode, the big dramatic moment would be mean to even hint at, and the finale... that's about as off-limits as things get, except to say that it's very effective, brutally tense, and best only played once for more than one reason.

Um. What else? The Christmas Duck from Gone Home is in it. Does that help?

Away from spoiler territory, this is a solid episode, though a slow-burner that once again involves lots of walking through the woods - and the same old QTEs against zombies, which suggest that the one good thing about the apocalypse is that the hordes of the undead will serve double-duty as the best bubble wrap ever. Bad day? Hungry? Just storm outside with a clawhammer, smash a few skulls open, and wander back inside, frustration gone.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 05 Mar 2014 08:00:00 +0000
Heroes of Dragon Age review




Read more…

Tengami review

This brief yet languid puzzle adventure, which brings a pop-up book of traditional Japanese illustration to life, is an obvious labour of love. It was made over three years by Nyamyam, a tiny team formed in late 2010 by a couple of ex-Rare staffers, Jennifer Schneidereit and Phil Tossell. Creative refugees from the corporate game factory, theirs is the sort of story that generates automatic goodwill. This goodwill is only reinforced by your first sight of the game's luminous, delicate visuals, and the obvious tactile pleasure of manipulating its papercraft world on the touchscreen: sliding tabs to move things, or flipping the pages of the book over to create a new scene or viewpoint.

Sadly, all that love and labour has resulted in little more than a nice idea and some gorgeous artwork in search of a game. A pop-up book begs to tell a story, but Tengami is a mechanical MacGuffin hunt with no characters, no narrative, no substance or resonance beyond a couple of wistful haikus about seasons passing. And a puzzle adventure needs puzzles, of which Tengami has few, and all but a couple are of feeble design. It's over in 90 minutes - and it would have been a lot less if your character, a man on a quest to restore blossom to a dying tree, didn't walk so slowly.

Brevity is no sin, of course. One of the great things about the mobile app markets is that they've created an environment where games can be small, intimate artworks that you can buy for loose change and spend a pleasurable hour or two turning over in your hands. Fireproof's Room games and Simogo's fabulously chilling Year Walk are great examples - and obvious bedfellows for Tengami, with their use of riddle-solving and gesture controls to open new spaces. But the comparison isn't flattering.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 20 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000
The Wolf Among Us, Episode 2: Smoke and Mirrors review

NOTE: While this review will not divulge any specific plot details, in discussing the events of Episode 2 there is inevitably a chance that it will impact your experience of Episode 1 if you have yet to play it. Consider this your spoiler warning.

Rather later than expected, the second episode of Telltale's adaptation of the Vertigo comic book Fables is finally here. Leaving players on a cliffhanger is one thing - making them wait the best part of four months before continuing the tale is quite another.

That delay will become meaningless soon enough, of course, and for anyone who binges on the whole season once it's complete it won't even register, but right now it can't help but hurt a story that desperately needs to establish momentum. It's especially damaging for a detective mystery, where there are multiple twists and turns to remember between episodes. After a third of a year, you'd be forgiven for replaying Episode 1 again to get back up to speed.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 11 Feb 2014 08:50:00 +0000
Dungeon Keeper review

Dungeon Keeper is a hard game to review. That's because any critique of this remake of Bullfrog's 1997 PC hit can't help but slide down the slippery slope towards being a critique of free-to-play gaming in general, and that's when people start banging the table and raising their voices and it all goes a bit Jeremy Kyle.

It is, at least, easy to see why EA revived this beloved cult classic in this fashion. Revisit the original Dungeon Keeper today and be amazed at just how many of its ideas have been reborn in mobile games. It was one of the first "tower defence" games, for example, flipping gaming convention upside down by casting the player as an evil tyrant, crafting the most perfectly evil lair in which to trap and kill do-gooder enemies who enter your hallways looking to save the world.

You did this by using an expanding army of imps to dig out new rooms, which you could then use to house traps, treasure and monster-spawning hatcheries. The more you expanded your labyrinth, the more stuff you discovered. The more stuff you discovered, the more new things you could build. It was a near-perfect feedback loop of routine and invention.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 05 Feb 2014 11:00:00 +0000
Joe Danger Infinity review

Spookily, it's a year almost to the day since I wrote about Joe Danger Touch for this very site, and much of what I said then still applies to this follow-up. Like its predecessor, Infinity is a giddy, colourful joy of a game, a collection of brilliantly designed, hazard-strewn gauntlets which the eponymous stuntman - along with a collection of unlockable characters - automatically speeds through, as you tap and swipe to prompt him into endos, wheelies, backflips and several other tricks. If you liked that game a lot, as I did, I'm confident you will get on with this famously.

But why exactly is Joe Danger such a joy to play on a touchscreen format? I've been pondering this for a little while, and I think the best way I can explain it is thus:

Touch controls can be pretty great for certain types of games. Games like Device 6, The Room 2 and Ridiculous Fishing benefit enormously from being developed primarily for such devices. But when I play certain other types of games on my iPad mini or my Android phone, I wish I was playing them with a proper d-pad - or analogue stick, in some cases - and buttons. This may be because I'm awful and old, and I've grown so accustomed to traditional controls that the very concept of virtual thumbsticks and circular tap points as a replacement feels horribly wrong somehow. The very highest praise I can offer to Joe Danger Infinity, then, is that it makes me miss buttons less than almost any other touchscreen game.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 09 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000
Oceanhorn: Monster of the Uncharted Seas review

There's a thin line between copycat and tribute, and it's a line that ambitious iPad adventure Oceanhorn walks with varying degrees of success. This is a game that wears its influences so brazenly that it's barely worth even naming names. It might as well be walking through the smoky doors on Stars In Your Eyes and declaring, "Tonight Matthew, I'm going to be The Legend of Zelda."

There are worse games to aim for, of course, but in taking aim at such a beloved classic - and one that has only just released yet another superb sequel - Oceanhorn leaves itself with a mountain that's impossible to climb. This is as indie as it gets, a game from Cornfox & Bros, a tiny Finnish studio trying to recreate the wonder of a nearly 30-year-old series, developed by some of the best designers in history and published by one of the biggest publishers in the world. It's not just that Oceanhorn wants to be a game in the Zelda style; it too often wants to be an actual Zelda game.

Inevitably, it doesn't succeed, but it's not for want of trying. Oceanhorn is one of those games that gets by on a combination of plucky ambition and accumulated goodwill, rather than more tangible gameplay strengths.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 06 Jan 2014 08:00:00 +0000
Republique: Episode 1 review

Touchscreen stealth gaming. Yeah, I just got a little shiver down my spine as well. Stealth is one of those gameplay styles that is so hard to get right, and so maddening when it's wrong, that far too many games can't even pull it off when using the multiple precision inputs of a joypad. What sort of mad fool would attempt it on a touchscreen?

The mad fools at indie developer Camouflaj, for one. Except it turns out they're neither mad nor fools. They're actually kind of ingenious.

Republique is a stealth game, but it makes more than a few tweaks to the expected formula. Key among these is a small but important shift in context. You're not controlling Hope, the main character, but rather you are helping her remotely by hacking security cameras and other systems. Rather than trying to ignore the barrier of the touchscreen, the game embraces it and makes it part of the fiction. When Hope talks to you via her phone, she's talking directly to you, through the physical device you're using to assist her. Suddenly, the interface pulls you into the game rather than separating you from it, making it a first-person game unlike any other.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 20 Dec 2013 08:00:00 +0000
The Walking Dead: All That Remains review

Officially, this episode is called All That Remains. A more accurate one would be Pulling No Punches, because if it's about anything, it's Telltale proving it's absolutely not afraid to hit a little girl. Emotionally. Physically. Repeatedly. Anywhere and everywhere it could possibly hurt. No longer are you shielded from the apocalypse by Lee, a muscled man capable of taking charge with both wits and fists. Now, you're just Clementine; small, frail and alone, in a world that hasn't gotten any kinder since the apocalypse. Zombies and scavengers don't discriminate though, and neither does pain. There's no shortage of any of them in store for her.

This being The Walking Dead, I'm going to try to avoid direct spoilers wherever possible. As a capsule summary though... this is more The Walking Dead, with a new story, picking up about 16 months after the last series. Nothing's really changed that much, for better or worse, and while so far it seems to be making a largely clean break from the specifics of the last one, it'd be worth playing the first series if you haven't already. Save games carry across from both that first season and the 400 Days DLC, but the Previously On before the episode starts will give away most of the biggest moments, whether you start with a save or not. You have been warned. (So far there's no real sign of any changes as a result of those games' choices, but it's still very early days.) If you really, really want to avoid any spoilers, the number at the bottom of this page is an 8. Enjoy your adventure!

For everyone else, this episode only drops the broadest of hints about what's coming up over the rest of the series. There's a new set of survivors, and they have a big secret. There are other, nastier figures at work too, their motives as yet to be glimpsed. Really though, neither is the focus here. Episode 1 is all about reintroducing Clem and establishing her as a main character, and it does both very well indeed.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 17 Dec 2013 19:00:00 +0000
Icycle: On Thin Ice review




Read more…

]]> Fri, 13 Dec 2013 08:00:00 +0000
The Room 2 review

It starts, of course, with a room and a box. This sequel to Fireproof Games' Bafta-winning puzzler is nothing if not familiar. Yet it's also often unexpected in the ways it expands the potential of the original, unfolding and unpacking its concepts with much the same confidence as the slides, drawers and moving panels that form its brain-teasing core.

It's a tactile sort of game, one very much in love with the deep, resonant mystery of objects. What's inside? What does it do? You'll twist, prod, slide and drag a giddy assortment of screws, drawers, wooden panels and brass plates as you inch your way towards some measure of understanding. That much, at least, remains unchanged from the first game. If you were beguiled by its quietly eerie contemplative mood, you'll find the same pleasures repeated here.

Where The Room 2 differs is in its scale. Previously, you were faced with a single table or plinth, and a single box which became a rabbit hole of connected puzzles. Not any more. Now the game lives up to its title more fully, offering larger locations with multiple interactive areas and puzzles that are intertwined between them. The first post-tutorial level finds you in the bowels of a ship, moving between a strange locked chest and a complex mechanical model galleon as you work towards a solution.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 12 Dec 2013 08:00:00 +0000
Assassin's Creed: Pirates review

One of the great things about Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag was how often you could pretend that it wasn't actually an Assassin's Creed game at all. Sure, you were still running across rooftops, dealing with Templar mischief and, you know, assassinating people - but for a good portion of the game you could segment all the accumulated franchise clutter away and pretend you were just playing a really fun pirate adventure.

That's even more true of this mobile spin-off, which wears the first two words of its title as a marketing hook more than a promise. Outside of a few static cut-scenes, the convoluted backstory of the main franchise is reduced here to mere background murmur, leaving you free to enjoy a life on the ocean waves with no parkour or Abstergo intrigue to get in the way.

After some perfunctory introductory tutorials, you're left with an open map - the first of many - and free rein as to where you take aspiring pirate captain Alonzo Batilla next. You're supposedly on the trail of the legendary lost treasure of notorious swashbuckler La Buse, but such matters rarely intrude.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 05 Dec 2013 09:00:00 +0000
iPhone 5S review

Dogged by controversy over the shortcomings of iOS 6 - and, in particular, the woeful state of the maps app at launch - the iPhone 5 didn't get much of a break during its initial weeks on the market. A solid device with excellent games performance and a logical refactoring of the screen, the phone was clearly another quality product from Apple, but game frame-rates and OS fluidity aside, it was difficult to see much of a reason to upgrade as enhancements to basic functionality weren't quite compelling enough. The iPhone 5S puts things to rights.

This review has been a long time coming - the insane schedule of next-gen console and GPU press events in addition to our usual workload combined to shunt back our appraisal of this new Apple offering, but on the flipside, the opportunity to take it on as our daily runner across the duration gives us a broader, wider view of the 5S from the perspective of a new owner with several weeks experience of the device under our belts - a valuable experience in addition to 'just' reviewing it.

On first glance, it's safe to say that there isn't much to differentiate it from the outgoing iPhone 5 - an observation you can level at any of the "S" devices Apple has produced. The chassis is virtually identical, the screen is the same, and the weight is like-for-like - there's still that almost unnatural lightness to the device that almost makes it feel insubstantial compared to the reassuring presence of the 4S. The only major difference on the front side comes from the home button, housing the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor. While the four-digit PIN remains as a security feature if you want to use it, the way to access a locked phone is now to press the finger of your choice against the sensor and wait for around a second for it to unlock.

Read more…

]]> Sun, 01 Dec 2013 10:00:00 +0000
Type:Rider review

It always smacks of laziness to introduce a game by declaring it a meeting between two well-known titles, but when the result is "Limbo meets Trials" and its aim is to educate the player in the history of typography, it's hard not to bask in the sheer left-field genius of the combination.

So, Type:Rider borrows the stylish silhouette aesthetic of Limbo but pairs it with the physics-battling traversal challenges of Trials. Rather than a motorbike, you're controlling a colon, turned on its side, and instead of barrels and ramps you're carefully navigating the curls and serifs of real-world typefaces on an interactive journey that begins with cave paintings and hieroglyphics and takes you all the way to the dawn of the digital age, via the Gutenberg press, Letraset and movable type.

Type:Rider was created on behalf of French cultural TV channel Arte and is accompanied by a touring exhibition, so you'd be forgiven for expecting something rather dry and academic, with gameplay tacked on as a last-minute sweetener. Yet one of Type:Rider's greatest surprises is that it's a fundamentally great game, regardless of its educational intent.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 19 Nov 2013 11:00:00 +0000
Rayman Fiesta Run review

Much as the delightful Rayman Legends improved and evolved Rayman Origins, so too does Rayman Fiesta Run build on the solid foundations set down by last year's Rayman Jungle Run.

It's another mixture of rhythmical platformer and endless runner, then, but the biggest changes have been to the game's structure. Whereas Jungle Run divided itself up into short worlds, each built around one of Rayman's abilities, Fiesta Run takes its cue from social games like Candy Crush.

Wait, don't run off! It just means that progress through the game is via a snaking pathway, along which you can also see where your friends are up to. Dotted along the path are gifts, bonus characters and little offshoots containing new levels. The more glowing golden Lums you collect in each level, the further down the path you'll advance, unlocking more levels and so on. It's a change for the better, quite frankly, since it explicitly ties your success in the levels to your success in the game at large.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 07 Nov 2013 14:00:00 +0000
Fist of Awesome review

Have you ever wanted to punch a bear IN THE MOUTH? That's the entirely unreasonable question posed by indie developer Nicoll Hunt in this deliriously silly tribute to the glory days of the scrolling beat-'em-up, and if your answer is in the affirmative then you won't be disappointed. You'll not only punch a lot of bears IN THE MOUTH, but also kick them in the nuts and stamp on their fiendish furry faces.

Don't worry, this isn't animal cruelty. You're playing as Tim Burr, a rugged lumberjack whose house has just caught fire and whose family has just disappeared. Then one of his hands grows gigantic and starts talking to him. Turns out that history has been rewritten, Planet of the Apes style, and now bears are the dominant species, with humans hunted for food. Brandishing his oversized fist and driven by a potent mixture of righteous fury and mild confusion, Tim sets off on a journey through time to put things right.

The first thing you notice is how well it plays on a touchscreen. This is a platform that has traditionally struggled to replicate arcade inputs, yet the approach taken here works beautifully. The left hand side of the screen is used as a virtual joystick for movement, while the right hand side is used for attacks. A quick tap delivers a basic punch, while holding the tap unleashes the Fist of Awesome. Small swipes to the left and right trigger kicks, and while bringing your finger down sees on floored enemies stomped. Swipe up to jump, and tap in the air for a flying kick.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Device 6 review

On developer Simogo's mysterious island, a word is worth a thousand pictures. Device 6 tells the story of Anna, a girl who awakens to find herself adrift in a tower set on on a spar of rock. As she starts to explore her surroundings, the sentences that construct her narrative begin to stretch out across the iPhone screen and form corridors, rooms, and battlements. It's a landscape you travel by reading. Turn left, and the text you're following turns left too, while paragraphs describing elevator journeys rise or descend with the thrum of a shuddering counterweight. The plot steadily unfurls into a map that you trace with swipes of your finger, leading you past mysteries stated and unstated, through puzzles both visible and hidden.

As with this February's Year Walk, Simogo displays a peculiar knack for conjuring isolation and recently vacated spaces, although the earlier game's church gates and tree stumps are replaced here with Bakelite telephones and hissing reel-to-reels, while fairytale illustration is traded for a blend of infographics and gorgeous old Penguin Books cover art. There's a touch of Cing's back catalogue to Device 6, and the whole production's been cold-filtered through 60s espionage TV, too. As Anna's journey drifts over territory initially staked out by Patricks McGoohan and Macnee, as codes are broken and dormant machinery roused, Simogo's game becomes the closest thing you'll probably ever get to playing a numbers station.

The developer's clearly moved on since Year Walk, although the games definitely feel like fellow travellers. This time the narrative's even quicker to fold back on itself, eventually entangling audience and creator and even the hardware the whole thing's playing on. The medium is a message here, although you'll need to replay the game several times, possibly with a pad and paper, to get that message down in full.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 17 Oct 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Marvel Puzzle Quest: Dark Reign review

Marvel's superheroes have faced many seemingly insurmountable challenges over the years: the world-devouring Galactus, the fiendish schemes of Doctor Doom, the mad titan Thanos. But can they survive - deep breath - the horrors of Free To Play?

Actually, spoiler alert, yes they can. Marvel Puzzle Quest includes many of freemium gaming's most odious mechanisms, including cooldown timers, multiple depleting micro-payment currencies and an omnipresent store that offers powerful boosts for those who toss a few coins to the ferryman, but none of them are ever quite enough to derail the experience. Indeed, the game is often quite generous, welcoming you back with big chunks of bonus currency or handing out a free character just to celebrate some online event or other.

It helps that the Puzzle Quest at the heart of the game is much the same addictive time-sink that it's always been. The series has been MIA since Puzzle Quest 2 back in 2010, and the familiar match-three core and light RPG trimmings remain intact. You have a team of Marvel characters, the roster of which can expanded by earning or buying comic book covers, and you pit them in gem-swapping combat against a variety of foes, ranging from basic grunts from canon-approved bad guy outfits like Hammer Industries, A.I.M and the Maggia, all the way up to heavy hitters such as Venom, Juggernaut and Doctor Doom.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 15 Oct 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Giant Boulder of Death review

The debate about violence in games is an important one, and gaming can only become more interesting if designers think up more things for us to do than mindlessly destroy stuff. Having said that, who doesn't love to mindlessly destroy stuff? And if you absolutely have to do that, why not do it as the titular vengeful rock of this game - thundering down an alpine mountain, flattening everything in your path?

The wonderfully self-descriptive Giant Boulder of Death is the latest mobile effort from Adult Swim, and it sits comfortably alongside the likes of Robot Unicorn Attack as a title that balances playful irony with fantastically addictive twitch gameplay.

The appeal is obvious: you start to roll downhill, slowly at first, steering yourself using one of three control methods. Hitting smaller objects - such as trees - earns you points, and as your carnage grows the local military brings out increasingly bizarre one-hit-kill obstacles to stop your gravity-assisted rampage. First out are the spike walls, but they're soon joined by homing mines, mecha-yetis and soldiers riding on triceratops.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 02 Oct 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Infinity Blade 3 review

Style over substance doesn't always need to be a criticism. When the first Infinity Blade was released, back in 2010, it wasn't the deepest game around. What it did have was an engaging and intuitive approach to touchscreen sword fighting, as well as sumptuous Unreal Engine visuals designed to give purchasers of the newly released iPad something to show off. The style was the substance, and it was a well deserved hit.

Was it a game that demanded sequels? Arguably not, but the industry must be fed. Where the first Infinity Blade dressed up short, punchy mobile gameplay in AAA graphics, with this third and apparently final entry in the trilogy, the game now resembles its AAA peers in more than just looks. It has inherited their bloat as well.

Combat remains largely unchanged. You march up to some hulking foe and do battle using a variety of dodges, blocks and parries to wear them down before unleashing your own flurry of blows in the few seconds before they regain their composure. It's muscular, satisfying stuff, made all the more enjoyable for its immediacy. Swiping to meet an incoming blow results in a clanging parry, tapping the corners sends you ducking left or right. It just feels right, and once you've found the rhythm of each enemy these encounters are a cinematic joy, rightly forming the meat of the game.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 20 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0100
2K Drive review

So it really isn't Project Gotham Racing. When word got around that Lucid Games, a team formed from ex-Bizarre veterans, was working on a driving game, several eager fans put two and two together to get PGR5. That wasn't the case, of course: Lucid was instead working with 2K as part of the publisher's concerted push into iOS gaming, on an all-new game that's out to compete with the bountiful successes of CSR and Real Racing.

But there is a lot about 2K Drive that is indebted to PGR, and Lucid's pedigree injects some real legitimacy to the sometimes fuzzy world of the mobile racing genre. Street-spec cars pound around loosely re-imagined urban tracks, while flickering away behind the sweet arc of a powerslide are systems that string all the way back to Metropolis Street Racer's kudos points. So it is Project Gotham Racing, really - but 2K Drive never quite lives up to its legacy.

It makes a decent swipe, though. 2K Drive's handling is surprisingly deep, and in the mobile space uniquely rewarding. There's none of the cotton-wool swathe that mutes Real Racing's cars, and with assists off, 2K Drive doesn't pull any punches. A Fiat 500 will let its front-end lead you waywards until you aggressively coax it around a corner, a feat made possible by a handbrake activated with a swipe of the brake pedal. It's a neat way to broaden the vocabulary of the mobile racer; Lucid is totally justified in its confidence in 2K Drive's handling.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 12 Sep 2013 14:00:00 +0100
Blackbar review

In light of recent events, a game about a draconian regime desperate to monitor and control the flow of information feels particularly timely. A text adventure with a twist, Blackbar offers a potent reminder of the power of the written word.

It's not unusual for a game to leave gaps in its narrative for you to fill in, but here that's literally what you must do. The game begins with you receiving a letter from your friend Kenty, who's beginning a new job at the Department of Communication, an organisation which has been set up to monitor all communication and censor anything controversial or negative. Any words of that nature are covered by the titular blackbar, and it's your job to unpack the missing words in order to move onto the next letter, and the next part of the story.

The conversation is one-sided but the writing smartly references your own, unseen missives. Soon, certain trigger words in those replies prompt direct warnings from the Department, as Kenty gradually becomes uneasy about her job. Her disillusionment soon turns to anger, then fear, as the Department tightens its grip. What follows is surprisingly riveting, and shouldn't be spoiled.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 05 Sep 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Ultima Forever review

So farewell then, Ultima. The title of developer Mythic and publisher EA's new entry in the series, an iOS-exclusive, free-to-play MMORPG-lite, is Ultima Forever. These words you can visualise chiselled on a gravestone. Make no mistake; this game has the surface of a vibrant fantasy, but it is a grasping and shallow product.

The free-to-play business model is entirely to blame for this, because Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar (to give its full title) is a game built around several principles that flow from it. Critics of free-to-play often focus on the money side of things, but really the specific amounts matter little. Ultima Forever rips you off with its keys, for sure, but it is their impact on how the game actually plays that ruins it.

This is a game built for idiots. The critic Ian Bogost once mocked up something called Cow Clicker to illustrate the banal absurdity of most freemium mechanics, and Ultima Forever is Cow Clicker with a beard. Everything is straightforward to the point of absurdity. Combat comes down to just tapping on enemies constantly. It really does. There are special moves, and you can move around to score backstabs or avoid attacks, but 99% of the time this is soul-crushing, mechanical drudgery. Go into a dungeon, tap furiously for 10 minutes, leave.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 05 Sep 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Space Hulk review

The passion of fandom can be a double-edged sword. In the case of Space Hulk, it's a power sword wielded by a man in ridiculously chunky armour, but it still cuts deeply.

This is the first Space Hulk game since 1993, a fact that Danish indie Full Control is sure to remind you of whenever the loading screens get a chance. There's pent up demand for another digital version of Games Workshop's influential 1980s board game and the developer is clearly such a fan of the source material that it often trips over its own feet, producing a game that is both incredibly faithful and distractingly scrappy. It's more awestruck tribute than actual adaptation.

The game itself is ingenious, thanks to Games Workshop's ruthlessly simple yet devilishly unforgiving ruleset. Space Hulk is an asymmetrical turn-based strategy game, pitting bulky armoured space marines against skittering alien Genestealers inside the belly of an abandoned and drifting spaceship.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 30 Aug 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Dropchord review

An orange-rimmed circle hangs in a black, spherical space, its contours momentarily described by neon-blue hatch lines that pulse in the dark. Hold two thumbs to the screen and light streaks between them, joining up to create a throbbing beam that bisects the darkness. The monolithic lettering 'MENU' appears.

Dropchord is not like the other Double Fine games. Indeed, it appears that this curio from the San Franciscan game studio best known for Psychonauts, Sesame Street and Brütal Legend is a chance for the staff to take a break from all that difficult stuff like characterisation, humour and narrative puzzle design.

These are characteristics by which the studio - and its luminary founder, Tim Schafer - have become known. They are also some of the hardest things to get right in video games. With 2014's Broken Age looming, burdened as it is by the expectations of a successful, multi-million-dollar Kickstarter campaign, small wonder DoubleFine has retreated for a moment into an abstract mobile game - also available on Ouya and for the Leap Motion controller for PC and Mac (see sidebar, below) - which features no characters, no one-liners and a thumping soundtrack to drown out all that peripheral noise.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 19 Aug 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Plants vs. Zombies 2 review

OK, hands up if you thought that EA would be the big publisher to launch a free-to-play game that doesn't gouge the player? That Plants vs. Zombies 2 manages to use in-app purchases in a non-abusive way that doesn't nerf the game design is perhaps its most surprising feature, but there's more to it than good business practice. This is a long overdue sequel that evolves a winning formula in fun and challenging ways.

The gameplay seeds planted in the 2009 original remain largely unchanged. A parade of zombies advances from screen right along five rows, and you place plants of varying abilities to fend them off. Should a zombie make it all the way across - and past your lawnmower last line of defence - then it's game over.

Almost immediately, Plants vs. Zombies 2 starts to tweak and embellish that core concept. The story this time around is that Crazy Dave, the pan-wearing vendor from the first game, wants to travel back in time to eat a particularly delicious taco again. Unfortunately, his time-travelling RV ends up sending everyone back to Ancient Egypt. Now you have to make your way through a series of challenges to get back to the present and taste that delicious Mexican treat.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 16 Aug 2013 13:00:00 +0100
The Drowning review

Imagine you discovered an amazing new food, and the first thing you tried to do was put it between two slices of white bread. Or what if you were handed a remarkable new musical instrument, and your immediate reaction was to see if you could make it sound like a guitar?

That's the frankly weird impulse behind the ongoing, quixotic quest to make first-person shooters work on touchscreens. A new technology that demands accumulated decades of input dogma be thrown out, inviting completely new ways to play, and some people apparently can't wait to make it do the same thing as every other gaming device. Such is the big selling point of The Drowning, a glossy touchscreen first-person shooter that claims to have come up with the answer to a question that didn't need to be asked.

The storyline is thin enough that you can safely skip it. Gloopy zombie-like creatures emerge from an oily sea and lay waste to the Earth. Handful of survivors... last stand.. .blah blah blah. What matters is that you can shoot these monsters in the face, just like you can on the PC or Xbox. Or at least, a little bit like you can on those platforms. The Drowning has to tinker with the guts of the genre to make it work without a joypad or mouse but, credit where it's due, the system that developer Scattered Entertainment has come up with is about as close as we're likely to get to something that works through touch alone.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 08 Aug 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Rymdkapsel review

Grapefrukt's Rymdkapsel, a real-time strategy game about building a space station, goes out of its way not to go out of its way. There is no story; no explanation for the hostile red ships that swarm your matrix of corridors and rooms in periodic waves of escalating threat, nor for the monoliths in all four corners of the play area that you're asked to research. Even the name, which means "space capsule" in Swedish, is left unexplained. Developer Martin Jonasson wanted to create a strategy game that was neither fiddly nor stressful, and his solution was elegant minimalism.

The set-up is cut to a single unit type - a little rectangular minion - and just over a handful of rooms to build. There are three resource types to gently consider - building blocks, particles and food - but you don't handle very much directly. Instead you prioritise activities by dragging and dropping between task types like "construction" and "research" on the lower edge of the screen, after which the minions in your station hop to it as though you've just issued a command. And they have one speed, whether they're carrying particles to build a new reactor or scurrying to a weapons room to repel hostile forces with tiny laser guns.

Having stripped the strategy down to almost nothing, Jonasson builds it back up by other means, most notably by forcing you to lay things out in a sequence of Tetris shapes, predicted by a little queue of outlines in the top-left of the screen. Whether your next room is a kitchen or a garden, it's going to be a 2x2 square, and the one after that will be a T, and the one after that will be an L, and so on. As enemy waves start to arrive more thickly and frequently, the challenge comes from finding a clean and simple way to design your space station so your minions have enough time to get things done between mopping up threats, and don't get caught in the open.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 01 Aug 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Breach & Clear review

How one makes an entrance is important, so the saying goes, and presumably never more so than when you're employed as a member of the Special Forces. For these balaclava-shrouded soldiers, a poorly executed appearance in a villain's doorway could well be their last.

It's so important, in fact, that the simply act of entering a room has become a staple of military shooter games over the past few years. Take Modern Warfare for example, in which you press the X button to plant a brick of C4 on some bewildered door before, in dramatic slow motion, you tear through the debris to pick off enemies before their chairs hit the floor. Hugely expensive sections of the highest grossing video game series in the world essentially involve dramatically entering a room.

Now, in Beach & Clear, we have an entire video game dedicated to the art of making an entrance. You assume strategic control of four special operatives, trained in close quarters battle and experts in breaching a room and 'clearing' its inhabitants with a bullet to the head. At the start of each mission you're presented with a bird's eye view of the target building. Its floors are gridded, as in a strategy RPG or chess, and, having directed each of your soldiers to one of the building's entrances, you must select whereabouts you want each man to move to on your signal. By rotating a vision cone you may direct each unit's line of sight and attempt to cover all the angles in the room. Then, when the plan has been formulated, you issue your squad with the signal and sit back and watch in glee or horror as they execute your orders.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 31 Jul 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Super Stickman Golf 2 review

It's odd, isn't it, that as the possibilities video game technology allows become ever more amazing, the keener developers are to recreate the real world. Contemporary games wear their verisimilitude like a badge of honour, while PR blurbs parp half-truths about 'authenticity' and 'realism' with depressing regularity. Imagine being that guy who went into game development full of excitement and ideas and ended up having to render the creases in Tiger Woods' immaculately modelled golfing slacks.

Most smartphone games don't have the kind of production budget EA Sports can afford to spend on such trifles, which is perhaps why many of them hark back to the good old days where video game avatars didn't need trousers - or indeed knees - to do their job. Super Stickman Golf seems rather proud of its similarly afflicted hero (and he is a hero: you try playing golf without any knees) by proudly declaring his physical deficiencies in the title. He's a stick man and he's super, and so, happily enough, is his game.

Here the sport of golf is less a good walk spoiled, more a good spin around a sticky rotating platform spoiled. Which is to say it has no truck with realism and is all the better for it. The courses here make the back nine at Carnoustie look like kids' stuff - greens often lie on floating platforms several dozen feet above the tee, and along the way you'll have magnets, icy ledges and portal gates to contend with. Bunkers are still present, of course, but you'll welcome their soft embrace when the alternative is rolling off into the void.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 29 Jul 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Tiny Thief review

Whenever thievery is the focus of a game, it's natural to assume that the result will fall into the stealth genre. Tiny Thief, developed by Barcelona indie studio 5 Ants and published under the Rovio Stars umbrella, does have a little bit of stealth, but it's more point-and-click adventure than full-time sneak-'em-up.

We can be even more precise than that, in fact. Tiny Thief belongs to a very specific subset of the adventure genre, best illustrated by Amanita Design's Samorost browser games. Let's call them click-and-see adventures. Rather than basing progress around the accumulation and unlikely combination of inventory items, these games simply present the player with charming little interactive dioramas where prodding stuff to see what happens is the basis for success.

That doesn't mean that there's no skill or thought involved. As Tiny Thief's tiny thief, you have six quests to work through, each made up of several distinct scenes. In each one, there's a specific object you have to pilfer in order to open the exit. The item in question is generally connected to some overbearing authority figure or similar bully - Tiny Thief is more Robin Hood than hoodie thug.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 29 Jul 2013 08:00:00 +0100
GoatUp 2 review

The news that Jeff Minter is working on a new Tempest game for Vita probably means GoatUp 2 is the last Lllamasoft title we'll see on iOS for a little while, although his most recent blog suggests he's not abandoned the format entirely. It's a pity for those of us who've enjoyed one of the most prolific spells of the veteran designer's career, even as he's demonstrated increasing frustration at the lack of attention his games have been getting.

Minter might be frustrated, but he surely can't be hugely surprised: the wonky presentation and surreal humour of his games means they are the dictionary definition of 'acquired taste'. As a more conventional platformer than its frantic predecessor, GoatUp 2 might be one of Llamasoft's most accessible releases, but it's also a game where you'll play a level called Bossy Chicken Above Carmarthen, farting a space invader to death on your way to the exit as a fuzzy sample of a tube station announcer warns you to mind the gap. Not that conventional, then.

Your ultimate objective on each level is to collect all the glowing keys before racing to the exit, although it's rarely as simple as that sounds. For starters, you need to keep your goat fed by grazing any grassy surfaces. And while your goat can jump, some stages can only be traversed with a little extra wind power: eating flowers and other foodstuffs gives you the ability to fart, which acts both as a double jump and your main offensive weapon.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 24 Jul 2013 10:00:00 +0100
Sprinkle Islands review

As a species, we're drawn to water. It keeps us alive, but that doesn't explain our fascination with its tactile properties. Show us a pool of water and we want to dive in, splash around or at least have a little paddle. More than that, we're captivated by the way water moves. Children are still endlessly amused by the way an empty squeezy bottle can be transformed into an impromptu water pistol, and even the most stoic of adults can't resist a playful squirt with the hosepipe while tending to the shrubbery.

It's this aspect of water that drives Sprinkle Islands, an effortlessly charming physics puzzler from the inappropriately modest Mediocre Games.

Depicted in whimsical pastel hues, Sprinkle Islands gives you control of a rickety go-kart style fire engine. You roll through the scenery until a nearby fire forces you to stop. Put out the fire and you can continue on your way. You do this with your hose, which can be raised and lowered with intuitive swipes on the left side of the screen, while a button on the right starts the water flowing.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Crabitron review

Giant crabs: didn't that meme die in 2006? Fortunately, the battles Crabitron is based on actually took place just off the shoulder of Ganymede rather than in ancient Japan. And it turns out that space is just the place for an oversized crustacean to get his grub on, full of galactic taxi cabs, nebula ambulances and delicious interstellar burgers. Of course, there's always the threat of meteor showers and police star cruisers to worry about, but hey, you have a big old pair of claws to swat such irritants away while you chow down.

Crabitron himself is more of a wobbly, fleshy mass with claws than a scuttling decapod, his arms elastically stretching out from his body. Just about everything that flies past is fair game for gobbling, although getting hold of your food is an art in itself thanks to a control scheme that has a little of Surgeon Simulator's comic awkwardness about it. It's the making of Crabitron.

You start the game by grabbing both claws between your thumb and index finger, or your index and middle finger if you prefer, on each hand. The latter makes manoeuvring the claws a little easier because they're both flush to the screen, but when it comes to grabbing stuff it's more natural to squeeze your thumb and forefinger together.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 23 Jul 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Ending review

Ending is a nightmare, and the nightmare details a group of bone-white toilet plungers who want to kill you. Toilet plungers and a range of bleached euphoniums. And plumbers' L-bends. And a bunch of other things I can't even begin to name. Whatever: they're all after your blood.

Ending is also an elegantly pruned-back puzzler and a compact Roguelike. The puzzler's there to introduce the enemies, the combat, and the whole mindset of the project in a careful upwards arc of managed difficulty, and then the Roguelike comes along and it's like being at a zoo when somebody opens all of the cages at once. Suddenly, these pieces you're used to dealing with in relative isolation and at a polite cerebral distance are spilling out en masse. You're overrun. You're constantly on the back foot. You're dying the death of a million zugzwangs. It's wonderful.

So what's the big idea, Ending? The big idea is that you're an @ symbol, working your way through a chequerboard maze and fighting off a range of foes as you head for the exit. Whenever you take a move, your enemies do as well, and you can only kill them - by performing the @ symbol equivalent of a headbutt - when you're in a square that's directly adjacent to them. So with those plungers, for example, you have to sidestep and move in little circles until you've got them where you want them. Leave a space between you and your quarry when they're facing in the right direction, and they'll do you in on the next move.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Warhammer Quest review

The roll of the dice is the beating heart of games. Before there were joypads, there were dice and counters and boards, and random chance trumped player skill every time. Nobody won Snakes & Ladders through superior tactics, and even in later board games where strategy was possible, picking the wrong card or rolling the wrong total could still unravel your best-laid plans.

It is, much like life itself, blatantly unfair. Your hopes and dreams crushed without a thought because a battery of tiny variables - the speed of a hand, the contours of a fingertip at the point of release, the flow of air over tumbling cubes, the microscopic divots and peaks of a table top - all conspire to deliver a one instead of a six.

Warhammer Quest feels a lot like that, which is unsurprising since it's an iPad adaptation of a board game. A fairly obscure 1995 Games Workshop board game at that, but one that seems - on the surface, at least - like a perfect candidate for the tablet experience. As developed by Rodeo Games, Warhammer Quest is a fast-paced, turn-based dungeon crawler in which your goal is no loftier than the accumulation of riches and experience (which you use to become stronger in order to loot more riches).

Read more…

]]> Fri, 19 Jul 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Crush review

I was listening to the Kermode and Mayo podcast the other day, during which the two were joined by Joss Whedon, who was there to talk about his recently released take on Much Ado About Nothing. Kermode affectionately referred to the film as a palate cleanser, and this description seemed to mildly irritate Whedon.

So I hope Luke Schneider doesn't take offence when I talk of Crush in similar terms. Like Much Ado, it was made in a comparatively short space of time (five weeks rather than 12 days, but that's still pretty brisk for a game of any kind), yet the result is equally refreshing, stylishly presented and engaging.

It's a puzzle game with a disarmingly simple hook: a pile of blocks in three different colours appears on the screen, like a half-full Tetris or Lumines session, and your job is to tap groups of connecting tiles to remove them before the screen fills up. The twist? Each time you tap, the pile surges downward.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 11 Jul 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Deus Ex: The Fall review

Calm any fears that Deus Ex: The Fall is a cheaply realised iOS side story that doesn't amount to very much. In truth, it's an expensively realised iOS side story that still doesn't amount to very much.

It feels almost ungrateful to be disappointed, really. Whether it was a smart approach or not, N-Fusion's done a laudably thorough job of cramming the entire Deux Ex shebang onto a touch-screen, from the relatively sprawling hub (this time it's Panama City) to the knotty storyline of PMCs, personal betrayal and Big Pharma corruption. There are main missions and side quests, there are people to talk to, there are decisions to make, emails to read, weapons to upgrade and Praxis points to spend. The 3D world is atmospheric and filled with detail, and the whole thing's stained by that rich Human Evolution amber. Even a suite of in-app purchases turn out to be entirely optional - XP boosts and in-game currency packs that you can happily ignore.

The more you play, however, the more problems start to mount up. They're simple problems, perhaps, but as any Deus Ex veteran knows, the most elaborate plan can always be compromised by the most basic of components.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 10 Jul 2013 17:44:00 +0100
Into the Dead review

Admittedly, the concept isn't all that promising. A zombie-themed auto-runner is an unholy union of two of the most tired trends in games right now, and that's before you consider the small matter of micro-transactions. Happily, it is a small matter thanks to sensible monetisation, while the game itself turns out to be a surprisingly smart little time-waster, suggesting someone at Pik Pok one day wondered how Left 4 Dead might play with the sprint button stuck down.

Good idea number one: it literally cuts to the chase. There's no scene-setting CGI cinematic, no comic book panels or tedious text intros to tap through. Instead, once you've hit play, there's the briefest of loads before you're stumbling to your feet, facing a crashed helicopter surrounded by the undead. You spin around and start sprinting through plains, forests and cornfields until you collide headlong with a zombie. At which point you hear the screams, guttural moans and squelchy chewing noises that mean it's game over. Three more taps and you're back in play, trying to beat your previous distance.

Before long, you'll run into your first weapon crate, which ostensibly marks the point at which the scales are tipped in your favour. In practice - at first - it changes very little. Your starter weapon is a feeble little pistol that packs all the firepower of a NERF gun and only has a handful of bullets in the chamber. Even once you've unlocked further perks - one makes crates appear more frequently, another gives you 50 per cent more ammo - it's only ever a brief respite from the bobbing and weaving. Chainsaws and shotguns, when they arrive, offer such a cathartic release of violence that you'll probably exhaust them within seconds.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 10 Jul 2013 10:00:00 +0100
rRootage Online review

rRootage Online is a version of the original PC rRootage, one of the finest productions from ABA Studios, which has one employee: the brilliant Kenta Cho. Cho's been making games for well over a decade now, mostly shoot-'em-ups, and gives everything he makes away for free; it's an attitude that he says comes from making the games he wants to play and having no interest in making money from them. In every respect he's a remarkable developer.

rRootage is one of Cho's finest (and oldest) games, a vertical one-screen shooter with tons of levels and four distinct game modes, and while modes can often seem like little bonuses in shmups, in rRootage they're the whole focus. The core of the game is boss fights. Every level is one giant ship at the top of the screen and your ship at the bottom, which is in fact just a hitbox with a shell. The boss ship fires a pile of bullets, and will change form several times throughout each stage, which also varies up the shooting patterns. And there's one tiny, crucial other detail: the closer you are, the more damage you do.

This is rRootage in 'Normal' mode, but this is only one of four ways to play through its many, many levels. The modes are like a personal history of shmups filtered through Kenta Cho's unique style, and normal is straight-up bullet hell, where your special attack is a bomb that wipes out all on-screen bullets and damages the boss. This is the best way to settle into rRootage's central rhythm of dodging and getting close, but it's when the mechanics begin to take on some classic influences that things get spectacular.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 08 Jul 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Wizorb - Ouya review




Read more…

The Walking Dead: 400 Days review

Telltale's The Walking Dead series is a gold standard for terse narrative efficiency. In the span of each two-to-three-hour episode, you'd learn to love, hate, and feel everything in between about its ever-shifting cast of desperate, conflicted survivors. Take three hours of the similarly high-concept zombie apocalypse drama The Last of Us and you'll see its leads travel from one goon-filled building to another with only a few meaningful character and plot interactions sprinkled in between. With its minimalist controls, lack of combat, and only the slightest hint of a puzzle to intrude upon The Walking Dead's slyly authored narrative, it's managed to cram in full stories in the time it takes most games to teach you how to crouch.

Season's One's 400 Days DLC takes this concept one step further by inserting the player into five roughly 15-minute stories set at a highway rest stop. With its off-kilter chronology, suspenseful scenarios, and interweaving plotlines, 400 Days recalls the classic 90s movie Pulp Fiction. It works, to a point - but it's difficult to shake the impression this format isn't suited to the series' strengths.

Part of what made The Walking Dead so special was that it had well-defined, complex characters who evolved over time, yet it told its story entirely through Lee's point of view, so you never quite got a sense of the world beyond what he'd seen first hand. 400 Days pulls back the curtain a bit to show how other folks are coping (or not coping) with things.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 03 Jul 2013 10:00:00 +0100
Ace Attorney: Phoenix Wright Trilogy HD review

Ladies and gentlemen of the court: Phoenix Wright is a goofy, spike-haired, blue-suited lawyerman who mostly has everyone drop dead around him. His first three adventures, Ace Attorney, Justice For All, and Trials and Tribulations mainly involve his various acquaintances dying from outlandish murders, occasionally reminiscent of the ways in which many Spinal Tap drummers have snuffed it. Phoenix is then usually called upon to defend the accused and Wright all Wrongs.

These three charmingly translated, robust and incredibly funny visual novels have previously wormed their bizarre gardening accidents into our hearts on the Nintendo DS, but now they've been handily ported to iOS by Capcom. You can download the app for free, but with that you only get the first two chapters of the first game before you have to fork out for the rest (each adventure available separately, or all together for a discounted £11.99).

I am his first witness. These three games are wonderfully constructed: the best thing about porting old games to iOS is the fact you can then replay games you know are great when you're stuck in the world's longest Post Office queue, trying not to fall asleep on a drunk on a night bus, or in the pub on an extremely boring date. I'd have brought my DS, but I forgot to charge it, forgot to pack Ace Attorney, and probably have lost the stylus, and sometimes the Pokémon stickers on my DS Lite make me get IDd in bars. Playing this sort of thing on a phone means you too can bring your OBJECTION! into the real world more often, just as I imagine Phoenix Wright does whenever someone cuts him off at a junction.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:00:00 +0100
Dungelot review

Dungelot's name probably seemed smart at the time, yet I can't help but feel it does this fizzingly clever roguelike no favours at all. That first syllable, 'Dunge' - urgh. Thankfully, Eurogamer knows better than to judge an app by its icon, because it turns out Dungelot is a cracker.

Dungelot's visual style is a little cutesy, and its early stages may well fool you into thinking this is some sort of casual roguelike. Your hero is represented at the bottom of the screen during the game, but isn't physically 'in' the dungeon. Instead, you tap squares to show what's beneath them, and chain little paths through each floor as best you can. Each level has a key on it somewhere and a locked door to the next level - and that's pretty much all you can guarantee.

What is great about Dungelot is how it marries this exploration side to its levelling; you never have to fight everything on a level, but as you descend you need to make sure to fight enough. The heroes you play come with inherent skills which can be boosted between games by spending the gold accumulated while playing, but the basic levelling is much simpler - attack power. Attack starts at 1-3 across the classes, and enemies don't have much more health than this for the first few floors. But almost every time you fight an enemy, it will deal damage, so getting the curve right, on what seems like an insultingly simple maths challenge, becomes a matter of life and death long before you realise.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 24 Jun 2013 11:05:00 +0100
Impossible Road review

70 points. Seventy! I grip my iPad mini as if clutching a rare and precious artefact, my heart just about ready to punch through my ribcage. I'm elated, relieved - perhaps even a little proud. But a nagging question remains: am I actually enjoying myself?

Kevin Ng's latest iOS venture is redolent of several games. The developer cites Geoff Crammond's Stunt Car Racer as an inspiration, but it reminds me equally of Super Monkey Ball (despite the fact that it's not super and there are no monkeys in it) and Mario Kart's Rainbow Road, if Miyamoto had a penchant for monochromatic minimalism.

The Monkey Ball comparison is mostly down to the vessel you're controlling, a pristine white sphere that you need similar dexterity to guide without plunging into its endless void. It's also there in the way you can speed your route to the next checkpoint - the most recent gate you pass represents your score - through perfect bounces as well as nimble steering.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 21 Jun 2013 10:38:00 +0100
Deep Dungeons of Doom review

Few collaborations initially instill such a warm feeling as this one: MiniBoss, the brilliant Brazilian team behind the ingenious puzzle-platformer Out There Somewhere, working together with Bossa Studios, the people who brought us Surgeon Simulator 2013. Then there's the name. Deep Dungeons of Doom: the perfect invitation for anyone who's ever looked at the map in the front of one of those fantasy paperbacks or rolled a wizard on a mimeographed character sheet before sitting back for a second, eyes closed, to dream of glory. From such an auspicious start, this clever and streamlined lootfest can't quite live up to your expectations, perhaps - but it tries to.

Streamlining is the operative concept here: you choose from one of three character classes - Crusader, Witch and Mercenary - and then you leap from a tantalisingly empty world map into a series of forbidding dungeons. Each floor contains a single creature for you to fight using just two buttons, one for attacking and one for defence. Attacking always leads to a cooldown, but there's bonus damage to be dealt if you get your timing just right. Defending then elaborates on this rhythmic conceit, encouraging you to read your foe for tells so as to raise your shield at the last possible moment. Blocked!

Each enemy comes with their own quirks, their own pace for you to settle into, and they die in a shower of coins and - occasionally - loot. Loot itself comes in two varieties - equipment, which provides a muddle of perks for as long as you're holding onto it, and items, which generally take the form of consumables such as potions. Throw in a magic meter alongside your health bar and a two-slot inventory restriction, and you have a neat little RPG that encourages you to play at full pelt, tapping your way through combat and then swiping upwards to move deeper into the dungeon, where bigger and badder beasties await.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:00:00 +0100
Summoner Wars review

Some games don't do themselves any favours, do they? Summoner Wars might as well be called Generic Nerd Game, and it's a real pity - all of the imagination and skill are in the product and not the presentation. I say this not for mockery, but because I'm always advocating games of this ilk - and in the pub, Summoner Wars is universally met with a lack of interest.

The idea of two summoners having a throwdown is an exciting one, of course, and Summoner Wars is not only an original take, but a tremendously adaptable and varied one - worth mentioning, by the way, that this is based on a boardgame. It's for two players and set on a grid-based battlefield; you take turns to summon creatures, move them, and attack. The summoners are also present and each has their own role; some like to get into the action and destroy minions, while others depend on hanging back in kind of super-support roles.

Veterans of HeroQuest may notice some similarities in how matches play out, but Summoner Wars doesn't quite work like any antecedent. Turns are divided into various phases; you build magic, summon creatures, then move them around and attack. But the real strength of Summoner Wars is in how different the armies are - the abilities are asymmetric, so you might end up with an army that depends on sneak attacks up against one that can hold off enemies at a distance. I have a bit of a penchant for the undead lot, Fallen Kingdom, whose summoner is able to sacrifice health to bring down the cost of super-powered creatures, as well as 'resurrect' dead units. Each army's abilities aren't just a little buff but the basis for how they play, informing every single decision.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 05 Jun 2013 11:45:00 +0100
Rise of the Blobs review

If you ask me, sound design is such an underrated facet of a good puzzle game. Think of Game Boy Tetris and the wonderfully weird little squiggle it treated you with for clearing four lines at once. Or the original Puzz Loop's snooker-ball clacks, Bejewelled's clinking gems and Drop7's porcelain crack. It's a big part of what keeps you coming back - if you think about it, a lot of puzzle games are essentially about tidying up, and the pops, bangs or jingles that reward you for a job well done are the game equivalent of being handed a sheet of bubble wrap after hoovering the spare room.

Robot Invader understands this, and that's why Rise of the Blobs gives you the full works. You get a delightfully squishy sound for removing a lone blob from the field of play, but take four out and it's joined by an echoing string of pops. Six prompts the strum of a guitar, and eight grants you the thumping whack of a pool ball thundering into a pocket. All of the above are accompanied by gentle ascending arpeggios. In short, taking care of business in this sounds great.

Happily, its systems are also brilliantly tuned. Your job is to prevent a rising tide of gelatinous cubes from climbing a cylindrical platform to reach a sentient sweet called Marsh Mal. You spin the plinth with your finger as Mal takes aim with coloured fruit, swipe down to hurry its descent, and then tap to pop the fruit when it comes to rest inside the jelly. This then triggers a chain reaction, exploding all directly connected blobs of the same colour. It's a bit like poking a trifle to death.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Stickets review

I can tell you about the rules that drive Stickets, but you should be the one left to uncover the strategies those rules allow for. Easy to learn, hard to master is the puzzle game mantra, and Stickets is both. It's wonderful, too.

And at heart, of course, it's deviously simple. You're faced with a 5x6 grid and handed a collection of pieces to place on it. Each piece is made of three differently coloured squares. You're given a series of randomised corners, essentially, laid out in four different orientations.

You earn points by placing these pieces on the grid - one point for every piece you manage to lay down. When you run out of space, you have to free up parts of the grid again by cancelling out any areas where three or more squares of the same colour touch. When you're out of options, it's game over.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 30 May 2013 08:00:00 +0100
The Football Playbook review

It hasn't been a vintage football season. Following last year's high drama, improbable triumphs and ridiculous injury-time comebacks, we've witnessed what happens after the Lord Mayor's show. The Premier League was won four weeks early by a side even its own fans would admit was hardly at its best. Two of the candidates for the usually nail-biting relegation battle were decided by playing out a goalless draw so lifeless as if to ensure neither side would be missed. Pundits talk of the Champions League upsetting the natural order of things, but this is hardly the first time Barcelona have suffered a shock defeat in the semis. A season that began with so much promise has been steadily petering out as it has progressed.

And so we come to The Football Playbook, which promises a "digital collection of tactical puzzles" for the armchair Mourinhos out there. It, too, gets off to an encouraging start, with a title menu resembling an attractively weathered post-war football programme and a businesslike tutorial introducing smart, intuitive touch controls. Yet anyone touting a well-thumbed copy of Inverting The Pyramid hoping to prove they know the difference between their trequartistas and their false nines will be disappointed long before the final whistle blows.

Each challenge begins with your goalkeeper in possession of the ball, the idea being to score before time runs out. Players are represented by coloured circles, which can be dragged around to make runs, or tapped if you want to pass to them. Should you reach the penalty area without the ball being intercepted or the clock running down - both of which force you to restart the puzzle - any player in space will automatically shoot, and assuming there's no opponent blocking the ball's route to goal he'll score. While you can set any number of players in motion before your 'keeper punts it out of his area, on most levels you'll need to adjust on the fly, shifting runs all over the park to draw defenders out, freeing up gaps for teammates to take advantage of.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 16 May 2013 08:00:00 +0100
Vector review

The arrival of phones and tablets as gaming's new wild frontier has thrown up plenty of debate about the difference between iteration and imitation, but if you want a neat case study of how inspiration can make a game better, take a look at free-running platformer Vector.

From the silhouetted character to the way he leaps and scrambles across rooftops, it's undeniably a game following in the footsteps of Canabalt. Yet for all its similarities, Vector is its own game and builds on Adam Saltsman's template with confidence.

Following a stark yet stylish opening in which we see our nameless hero break away from the corporate, Orwellian drudgery of his futuristic workplace, attracting the attention of fascistic pursuers in the process, we're plunged into a beautifully realised and animated world.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:25:00 +0100
Pixel Defenders Puzzle review

A man may be entitled to the sweat of his brow, but what happens when he wants to chill out? Pixel Defenders Puzzle may well be the answer, an iOS title that's like an RPG Triple Town, and a recommendation from none other than Ken Levine - a sure sign, if one were needed, that this is much more than just another match-three puzzler.

Pixel Defenders Puzzle takes place on a screen-sized grid which, depending on the level, can be dotted with obstacles, ready-made warriors, and one pixelly VIP. Keeping the latter alive is nearly always your goal. Waves of enemies will enter at the top of the screen and a countdown ticker indicates when they'll attack; some go straight for the jugular, others freeze the VIP in place, and mages buff their allies.

Matching pixels is how you build an army to take the beasties down. Early stages limit the number of colours you're working with, each one producing a different kind of defender, and three pixels combine to create a low-level warrior; blue pixels, for example, will create a wizard. Every match you make produces energy to fill a five-part action gauge, and attacking with any defender uses one action point.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:00:00 +0100
The Silent Age review

Stylish and simple, there's much to recommend in this free episodic point-and-click game from Danish indie studio House on Fire. An elegantly constructed time-hopping adventure, its only weakness is a fondness for puzzles that are just a little too easy.

You start the game as Joe, a hapless janitor working in a shady government installation in 1972. After performing a few mundane tasks, you're sent to clean up the basement laboratory where things take a darker turn. There's blood all over the floor and a dying man hiding in a locked room. With his last breath, the man insists he's from the future and implores you to find his younger self and prevent him from travelling through time in the first place. Apparently the fate of mankind itself is at stake. With that, he hands you a tiny handheld device and dies.

It's a neat premise, leaving the player with a clear long-term goal but little idea of what it actually means. We're never allowed to run ahead of Joe as the story unfolds at its own tightly controlled pace, with only occasional bursts of exposition and several subtle clues dropped in your path as you concentrate on more immediate problems: escaping from buildings, opening locked doors, finding where our mystery man lives and repairing a broken down ambulance to reach him.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 08 Apr 2013 12:00:00 +0100
Star Wars Pinball: The Empire Strikes Back review

When I was a kid, I used to hang around the local arcades an awful lot, and pinball was what the men played. The machines were fascinating, but unapproachable for an eight-year-old: too big and constantly surrounded by chain-smoking malcontents. Every so often there would be the scary shunt noise, great big bangs snapping you out of a virtual reverie. Sometimes there'd be no-one around, though, and then I'd stare at the flashing lights and gaudy art, wondering if I should put one of my precious 20ps in. But Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles always won out.

So the first pinball game I ever played was Sonic Spinball and, though I've obviously been on real machines since, pinball has always been a video game for me - and as I became fascinated by its history and heritage, ironically enough, even more so. But while titles like Pinball Hall of Fame: Williams Collection encapsulate this, there's also a purely virtual strain of pinball games that do things that couldn't be done with a physical machine. And Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is one of the best, probably the best, I've ever played. Not just that, it also manages to capture everything I love about Star Wars better than any other game has in years.

Star Wars is a cultural touch point that's become an all-encompassing children's brand, and along the way alienated grumpy sods like me who think the original trilogy is where it begins and ends. If you're nodding in agreement, this is an essential purchase. The Empire Strikes Back table is a brilliant distillation of Star Wars' finest moment, absolutely jammed with voice samples and table mechanics that evoke the movie, its scoring system both intricate and deeply bound to the aesthetics.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 05 Apr 2013 08:00:00 +0100
DRM: Death Ray Manta review

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, but thankfully we can now consign this ugly initialism to the funeral pyre of justice. Burn! And rise, Death Ray Manta, a googly-eyed Elasmobranchii that shoots lasers, kills things, and would never dream of restricting your access.

Not just a funny game, DRM is a fresh one - a twin-stick shooter that doubles up as a quickdraw nemesis, replacing long levels with frantic and fast chunks of battle. In screenshots it may look like a Geometry Wars type of experience, but DRM is a much more tightly-focused and unforgiving game. Each stage lasts seconds, buffered by a few seconds of visual transition, so there's a strange rhythm to playing it: constant bursts of intensity with pauses for breathing.

The arenas are populated by a surreal mix of homing bunnies, missile-launching security cameras, mines, Gridrunner turrets and a single slice of psychedelic tiffin. Bag each stage's tiffin for a weapon and score boost and blow away everything else; stages end when all of the free-floating enemies have been killed, regardless of whether you snaffled the cake. And just to emphasise, this takes place over seconds.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:10:00 +0100
Finger Hoola review

I am not what you would call co-ordinated - the very idea of doing two things at once makes me cross-eyed. And yet with Finger Hoola I have discovered a love of confusing myself to soothing background music. It's an odd game that hits all sorts of familiar receptors, yet doesn't do a single familiar thing.

The clue's in the title, of course, and Finger Hoola's central interaction involves your whirling big hula-hoops around the screen using one and later two fingers (things start off slow). God knows why someone thought this was a good idea, and yet it turns out to be one of the most relaxing, and very occasionally fraught, uses of a touchscreen yet. There's little to say about the motion of the hoops beyond that they feel right, looping slowly around a steadfast digit and careening wildly when it starts doing the same.

What do you do with them? There's a weird hybrid of a pan-pipe and a spirit level in the middle of the screen, and the speed of each hoop's rotation moves a dinky little platform up and down either side - faster is higher, slower is lower. Each stage splits the central column into different levels, and these segments light up in sync with the background music, adding their own notes to it as your platform reaches that section and (hopefully) stays there. It's this that's the key to Finger Hoola, as you tend to either dramatically overshoot, zipping through the section and blasting out the other end before the note's played, or bob up and then bottom out before time.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:00:00 +0100
Fluxx review

Fluxx is a game about rules - making, breaking and ultimately winning with them. It's a tricksy thing, a party game with a dash of the parlour that runs on luck but is decided by skill. Who plays what, and when, acquires a new importance when anyone can change the rules afterwards.

Originally a physical card game, Fluxx has been brought to iOS by Playdek. This publisher has a truly stellar back catalogue of iOS card games, including the likes of Ascension and Food Fight, and Fluxx is another high-quality production. The cards' designs are bright and colourful and the game automatically zooms in on any text when a card is played for a lingering moment before putting it into effect. This is important because, as the name suggests, Fluxx is all about reacting to new situations.

The game's played by two to four players (this version supports a single player versus AI, as well as pass-and-play offline multiplayer and asynchronous online games). Each player starts with three cards, and the deck of 100 is divided into types: New Rules, Actions, Keepers and Goals. The rule cards are how you set the pace of a game, impacting everyone until removed or superseded - and hopefully changing things up to suit your standing while messing around with the others.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 29 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000
Beastie Bay review

Beastie Bay will remind you a lot of other Kairosoft games, like Game Dev Story. During its simplistic monster battles, it will almost certainly remind you of Pokémon. But it most reminded me of a maths teacher I had in primary school who would use strange examples to make the subject more interesting: instead of apples and coins, it was dinosaurs and doughnuts. All that silliness would distract us all from the fact that we were doing boring old sums, and Beastie Bay uses similar misdirection techniques, with moments of calculated weirdness - and the occasional dose of cute - to deflect attention away from its systems. Which, when it comes down to it, are often little more than busywork.

Still, it's a formula that has served Kairosoft pretty well so far, and it works again here. The developer knows that one sure-fire way to keep your attention is to offer you constant encouragement that you're doing the right thing. Accomplishments come thick and fast and are rewarded with adorable animations and triumphant little fanfares. It's positive reinforcement as an art form, and yet it does it in a way that rarely feels cheap. I've played dozens of console games that shower you with Achievements and Trophies and it usually feels patronising. Somehow, Kairosoft games manage to nimbly leap over that particular pitfall.

It's odd, because at times you can almost hear the cogs whirring. "The player's getting bored - quick, let's throw them a sly pop-culture reference or a silly pun to keep them playing." And the next thing you see is a genetically modified ape named Chimpan Z, or an enemy saying "gotta catch 'em all", and you smile and you keep tapping away. You'll often feel manipulated into playing on, yet you'll be powerless to resist. Such is the Kairosoft way: once you're caught in its net of feedback loops, unhooking yourself is far from easy.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 28 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000
Ridiculous Fishing review

You don't often get tales of high drama or years of development hell in the quickfire world of mobile gaming, but here's one. Ridiculous Fishing, over two years in the making, is a fleshed-out version of Radical Fishing, the crude but compelling Flash debut of Dutch indies Vlambeer. (You might know these die-hard arcade fanatics from the phenomenal Super Crate Box.)

You can get the full story from the horse's website, but the gist is that Vlambeer put together a dream team to remake Radical Fishing for iOS - talent that has had a hand in everything from Spelltower to Spelunky and Solipskier. But this supergroup was dealt a cruel blow when a clone of Radical Fishing - I won't do it the dignity of naming it here - hit the App Store first and cleaned up. Depressed and demotivated, the team let its project languish and moved on to other things, almost disintegrating in the process. It must have taken a mighty effort of will to go back to it - but here it is, its troubled gestation belied by its confident polish and impish sense of humour. This game isn't subtitled "A Tale of Redemption" just for laughs.

Ridiculous Fishing is a pure mobile game, one of those one-minute one-shots you'll rerun hundreds of times. At its heart is a see-saw rhythm, a single, perfectly described parabola of silliness that ends exactly where it starts - with you hitting the button marked "Fish!" for another go.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000
Sonic Dash review

I can remember when a new Sonic the Hedgehog game was the biggest story around. I remember live-action adverts, Sonic 2s-day, the disbelief at those first magazine photos of the Sonic & Knuckles cart. "Among Mario's clones," Shigeru Miyamoto told Edge magazine in the late 1990s, "Sonic is a good one." Originality was never the hedgehog's strong point. Even so, copying Temple Run seems a long way to fall from Super Mario.

Viewed from a more optimistic angle, at least the endless running genre's a good match - indeed, Sega's investors may well wonder why it's taken so long. And I mention the moneymen because, while there's good stuff to talk about with Sonic Dash, the entire game is framed and ultimately spoiled by in-app purchases. Sonic Dash costs £1.49 upfront and uses rings and red stars as currencies - the former picked up and banked in-game, the latter awarded rarely and used to unlock new characters and buy continues. The standard ring-doubling booster will set you back £2.49 - pretty cheeky, I thought - but even with this you'll acquire upgrades at a snail's pace, and without additional purchases or some pretty dedicated play it won't unlock more than one character, if that. So: £4 for an endless runner, and a few more quid each if you fancy playing as Knuckles or Tails.

This probably wouldn't annoy me so much if Sonic Dash didn't have a habit of telling you to buy £19.99 packs of rings and stars after a game over. It asks directly for more money multiple times during every session in a manner so brazen and intrusive, it feels shoddy. Sonic is first and foremost a children's character, one that specifically appeals to young boys; I know this, so Sega knows it a hundred times over, and yet it has decided to release a product that demands cash from players again and again for things like power-ups. Honestly, when did three lives get replaced with purchasable revive tokens? Just because you can do something, as the saying goes, doesn't mean you should.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:34:00 +0000
Food Run review

There comes a point when you wonder just how many platform games are left to play. And how much have platformers got left to give in the genre's fourth decade of existence? Such thoughts occur to an habitual browser of the iOS store, with its cornucopia of buttons-on-screen banality. Then a game like Food Run comes along and such chin-stroking is instantly forgotten, replaced by a simple and timeless joy in motion. Remember that?

Developer Kevin Ng may not be a household name yet, but his Flick Kick Football dominated pub conversations on release - a pure gem. It might seem strange to move from such a bespoke use of touchscreen controls to the platform genre, but Food Run does so while taking a massive risk: it automates everything but the jumps, and then builds the levels around increasingly subtle use of them.

You control an egg to start off with, one that is somehow more charming for its lack of a face. The production values throughout Food Run are immense, and its art style and animations bring its kooky, colourful cast of food objects alive; at the start of each stage the egg gees itself up with a little leg backwards, before setting off with a whoop of excitement. This alone raises a smile, before the outstanding circus tunes kick in and give each journey an irresistibly bouncy backdrop. Perhaps the best thing about Food Run's look and sound, however, is that it's so far removed from all the mass of pixelwork and cute animals on iOS.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:00:00 +0000
Plague Inc. review

The Earth's only real problem, it has often been observed, is humanity. Plague Inc. thus offers the opportunity to save the planet by eradicating our species from existence, giving you control over the evolutions and mutations of various infectious diseases - the means to spread, and then the tools to finish the job. The only obstacles are medical science, hand-washing, and occasionally air filters.

Plague Inc. presents you with a simplified world map and the choice of where your baby infection takes its first steps. How fast it spreads depends on how many ways it can be transmitted and how well you suit it to its current environments, so the early-game upgrade tree concentrates on vectors like insects and birds, or blood transmission, as well as surviving extreme environments. Starting in Afghanistan, for example, a plague that transmits through blood and livestock will spread fast.

Your role at this point is that of observer and nudger-in-chief. Each alteration made to the plague affects where it's spreading and how fast, with poppable icons indicating a new country's infection. Before humanity can be eradicated, which is the really fun part, you've got to make sure you're going to get all of the buggers - anyone left alive means failure.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 04 Mar 2013 08:00:00 +0000
Olo review

Even the name has perfect symmetry. Olo is one of the classiest productions you'll ever see on iOS, a minimalist multiplayer game that's as achingly gorgeous as it is perfectly tuned. I know I'm throwing around superlatives like confetti here, but there's no denying it: Olo, in the common parlance, is a beaut.

Your seduction begins with the soothing glow of the title screen, shifting through primary colours as a beguiling tune plays. A guitar softly enters, strumming away. Who are you, guitar man? "Silence," he whispers. "I am the sound of impeccable taste." Two-player? Four-player? Online? Three modes; three letters in the name; three items in a list. This is how Olo rolls.

The game is an amalgam of boules and air hockey, played vertically on an evenly-split rectangle. The two colours change in every game (of course they do, this is Olo), but if I'm red then the top half of the screen will also be red - and that's what to aim for. You pitch the circular Olos towards this like pucks, and any in that region score one point. You take a turn, then your opponent does, until you're both out of Olos.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000
Real Racing 3 review

You can probably tell by the size of the yachts in Monaco's harbour, the opulence of the motorhomes that form a worldwide series' travelling circus or the amount of inbreeding evident around the paddock of Silverstone on a Grand Prix weekend that motor racing is a rich man's game. You can't just turn up to the races with a pair of fresh boots and a big heart: a single season in Formula Ford, one of the most junior of categories on the national scene, costs in excess of £120,000.

So kudos to Firemonkeys, the new outfit forged by EA from esteemed Australian mobile studios Firemint and Iron Monkey, for being the first developer to fully realise the crippling costs of motorsport in interactive form. Here's a game that's not shy about handing you repair bills at the end of a race and one that doesn't blush over an in-game car that costs almost £60 in real-world money.

In fairness to Real Racing 3, there's a lot more to its authenticity, and it's not all quite so grating. An extension of Firemint's deservedly popular racing series, this continues the good work of its predecessors on track, and it strives yet further to back up the 'Real' part of its racing. Licensed cars are now given licensed circuits to bound around, and it's a move that does much to help the series attain its dream of being a real sim on a mobile device.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:03:00 +0000
Momonga Pinball Adventures review

Paladin's latest combines pinball with flying squirrels, which means it's already off to a pretty good start. It also combines pinball with action-adventure game design - possibly an even better idea.

This is seriously elegant thinking, actually, with each level threading you through a bright top-down world filled with hazards and loot, while the movement of your adorable little avatar is controlled by flippers on either side of the screen. It's a clever means of simplifying controls for touch-screen input, and it encourages you to approach a series of intricate stages in an ad-libbed, knockabout way. No virtual joysticks here: just taps for left and right and the occasional slide of the thumb to fire you into the action at the very start.

Rather than leaving you to control a shiny ball bearing - they're useful if you're an engineer but not much fun if you're trying to relate to your on-screen presence - Momonga Pinball Adventures places you in charge of one of those flying squirrels, the only guy in his village not to be kidnapped during a mysterious spate of flying squirrel kidnappings that you may have read about in the red-tops. Okay, the story may not have made it to the tabloids, but no matter: it's your job to bounce your squeaky hero across a series of nine short levels towards - spoiler - a cliffhanger ending that comes with the promise of more content, collecting stars, avoiding the drain - it will take away a life - and even fighting the odd boss as you go.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:00:00 +0000
Year Walk review

Several years ago, I saw an exhibition by a local artist who made coffins for the birds he found washed up on the beach near his home: weird little curved boxes, tidy and cleanly built, yet strangely organic with it. The whole effect hinged, I guess, on a kind of clash of exteriors and interiors. You know: the smooth, painted surfaces contrasted with the knowledge of what lay rotting inside.

There are no artists and no beaches and no coffins in Year Walk, but there is death and there is nature and there are grim spaces for your imagination to trickle into and fester. For me, there was also that familiar tension, too: the clean lines and tidy shapes of the textured, storybook design used to support the darker organic mass of the story that it's been employed to tell.

I won't be spoiling that story, since, a few puzzles aside, most of the considerable strengths of the latest iOS game from Simogo - creators of Beat Sneak Bandit - lie with its narrative and the manner in which it all comes together in your mind. Suffice to say it's a horror game, despite its prettiness: a horror inquest, really. Lost amid Year Walk's frigid brooks and silver-skinned trees, you'll find an earthy tale of rituals, destiny and, inevitably, murder. These ice fields leak blood.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:40:00 +0000
Ghostbusters review

I'm always surprised that there aren't more Ghostbusters games, especially in the management sim genre. David Crane's 1984 official tie-in got the ball rolling with a game that asked you to run the Ghostbusters business rather than simply zapping spirits, but nobody has bothered to revisit the idea. Until now.

Unfortunately, the developer doing the revisiting is Capcom's Beeline Interactive, the same studio responsible for the controversial Smurfs' Village, one of the first iOS games to raise questions about the micro-payment gameplay model. Ghostbusters, sadly, follows the same payment-heavy, gameplay-lite path.

After a short tutorial in which you're schooled in the ways of bustin' by cartoon versions of Venkman, Stantz, Spengler and Zeddemore, you're left to your own devices as the owner of the New York Ghostbusters franchise with three new recruits in your team. A nearby skyscraper has been taken over by a mysterious purple portal and your long term goal is to reach the top of this tower and save the day.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:10:00 +0000
Spaceteam review

At the beginning of a game of Spaceteam, the avatars of two to four friends are 'beamed up' onto a spaceship. Around five minutes later, this happens:

"Activate the M-Spoon."

"Turn on the meta-loop. Can't see M-Spoon."

Read more…

]]> Fri, 15 Feb 2013 08:00:00 +0000
Pride and Prejudice review

What is your shameful gaming secret? Everyone's got one. Perhaps you've never played Halo. Maybe you think Dishonored is a bit depressing. Or perhaps you harbour a dark sexual fantasy involving Waluigi and Dr Robotnik, or that woman out of Final Fantasy with the rabbit ears, or all three.

Here is my secret shame: I had to look up a walkthrough for Pride and Prejudice.

That's Pride and Prejudice the "hidden object puzzle adventure", as it's described on the box, not Pride and Prejudice the novel. (As an English Literature graduate I possess an in-depth knowledge of Austen's work, having spent most of 1998 watching Clueless and Bridget Jones's Diary on VHS.)

Read more…

]]> Wed, 13 Feb 2013 08:00:00 +0000
Pixel People review

Time and skill: video games have demanded one or both of these investments from players for over three decades. The skilful player is able to move through a game on merit, mastering its systems through experience or natural ability. The time-rich player is able to progress through investment of effort, increasing their character's strengths through repetition, accruing in-game currency to purchase a faster car or sharper sword.

The mainstream free-to-play model popularised by FarmVille has altered this recipe in a fundamental way. In order to make the game appeal to as broad a range of players as possible, the skill requirement is removed and replaced with money. Now, game progress is achieved through time investment (waiting for your crops to mature, buildings to erect or soldiers to train) or financial investment as you pay real money to expedite the process. Good free-to-play games find ways to inject some of the old skill into the mix, but the poor ones ask for nothing more of their players than persistence or wealth. In these cases, free-to-play presents more than a mere shift of business model; it changes the very nature of a game.

Pixel People is a free-to-play game dressed to appeal to skilful game players. It assumes a bright, sharp pixel-art aesthetic and employs enticing imperatives like 'Splice', 'Explore', 'Discover' and 'Build' that imply the need for ability and the capacity for self-expression. But it's soon clear that Pixel People is an exquisitely presented game with a hollow heart, asking players for their time or money and offering little satisfaction in return.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000
Wide Sky review

Video games are nothing if not pro-hedgehog. In life, the spiny mammal has it rough. He spends the year either quaking in bushes hiding from ravenous foxes and owls, skittering across main roads between the oily weight of traffic or sleep-dead in the cosy grip of hibernation. In video games, however, the hedgehog is somehow a notorious acrobat, callous pugilist, dextrous treasure-hunter and sometime sportswear model.

See how the hedgehog explodes through his foes at spine-breaking speed - his trainers a crimson blur - grasping fistfuls of gold coins in Sega's Sonic. See how the hedgehog loop-de-loops through the air with dazzling poise, latching an extendable rope to the nearest cloud to swing himself yet higher through the stratosphere in Wide Sky. Video games are routinely accused of fulfilling teenage power fantasies. But perhaps they're really here to make hedgehogs feel good about themselves?

Certainly in this, Marcus Eckert's debut iOS title, the hedgehog cuts an impressive figure, splicing the air in a tight ball, swinging wide arcs around clouds on his extendable rope like a reincarnated hippy Bionic Commando. The game's witty, absurdist text is critical, describing these creatures as having "wicked souls" and being "mistrustful of government" and "undiscerning painters." However, in motion, Wide Sky is a bighearted ode to the hedgehog.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 07 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000
Time Surfer review

The endless runner is surely the platformer of our age, if only in the way in which breakout successes have led to a huge field of champs and also-rans. The bar is always getting higher, in other words, and yet Time Surfer sails over it effortlessly. It may have obvious influences, but it makes something new from them.

The most obvious are Tiny Wings and Jetpack Joyride. Time Surfer's randomised 2D world is filled with deep curves to dive into and shoot out of, woven through with a challenge-based levelling system and a plethora of unlockables. The twist is in giving you the most potent tool possible in a high-score game: a way to fix mistakes.

Time Surfer grants you the ability to rewind the last few seconds of play and, far from being a gimmick, this defines the experience, allowing its layouts to be considerably more fiendish and packed than you might expect. Rewinding uses up energy (shown at the top of the screen), but this is easily refilled by picking up the crystals scattered around - so it's always an easy decision to push the button. Correcting a bad approach angle, diving down to snaffle a piece of cake, or erasing an ugly death from the record books; it's an all-purpose get-out-of-jail-free card.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:00:00 +0000
Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes review

"You're reviewing Clash of Heroes again?" Tom asked me in yesterday's meeting. Why bother? It's a fair question. We've had more than our fair say on Capybara's brilliant hybrid of role-playing game, turn-based strategy and match-three puzzler already.

Dan Pearson (RIP) reviewed the DS original three years ago, calling it "a very good game indeed" - with some understatement. Kristan Reed (RIP) went further when he reviewed the remake for Xbox Live Arcade and PSN a year later: "With a depth and longevity that humbles most full-price releases... Clash of Heroes HD demands your immediate and undivided attention." Then I awarded it Game of the Week (RIP) and eight months later, after it had appeared on Steam as well, Fred Dutton (RIP) anointed it as one of our Games of 2011 (it had topped his list outright, and mine). "The gameplay system at Clash of Heroes' core is a thing of rare, bewitching beauty - a creation so deep and so elegant that it will keep you up at night," Fred wrote, and he was right.

So if you're a regular reader, you already know the high esteem we hold this game in, and if you're not, the above should be all you need to draw one easy conclusion. (Two, if you count the fact that reviewing Clash of Heroes is a sure sign that you won't be writing for Eurogamer much longer - I'm surely pushing my luck writing about it twice.) Clash of Heroes is a classic game and this iOS version returns it to the portable touch-screen gameplay it was originally designed for. Go forth and download.

Read more…

]]> Tue, 29 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000
The Walking Dead: Assault review

In the Walking Dead comics, fighting a zombie is always a massive deal. Its survivors are all too aware of the dangers involved, the risk of attracting attention, and how one false step means death. They'll do almost anything to avoid a big fight. So the series doesn't seem ideal for a video game subtitled 'Assault' - but the first of many surprises here is how smartly it's approached unfamiliar territory.

This is a top-down strategy-shooter with the emphasis on the former, where you guide a group of four through zombie-packed locations, taking care of business and gathering supplies. The distinctive black-and-white art style of the comics is a heavy influence on Assault's look, making this feel like a much closer companion than Telltale's colourful adventure (visually at least), and every element is realised in 3D.

The viewpoint can be spun 360 degrees as well as zoomed in or out, essential for checking out alleyways and gaining a perspective during larger engagements - it's not just a nice idea, well executed, but an essential tool. The addition of comic book onomatopoeia during fights ("Thwack!"), along with brief glimpses of panel art to indicate incoming zombies, are the final flourishes of a gorgeous and faithful visual achievement.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:05:00 +0000
Wave Trip review

In an age where great iOS games seem to come out every week, you always need that little bit extra to stand out. Wave Trip is unusual enough, a 2D left-to-right flying game where the level's elements are also the sounds. But as well as its own layouts, called songs, Wave Trip offers a brilliant interface for building your own and brings in other user-generated content seamlessly.

Each song is built out of blue, orange and pinky-purple shapes - the first two are good and the last is bad. Blue elements tick up your score multiplier one-for-one, whereas the orange ones are what actually scores - as well as releasing a friend of your weird avatar from captivity. Despite Wave Trip's overwhelming focus on musical gameplay, just as much care has gone into the art style; you control a flying pyramid-head, with a large eye straight from Patapon, who's flanked by tiny suns and bobs up and down on the left. On the right, various imprisoned buddies float around in bubbles.

The enemy blocks come in types; most are stationary, some move to attack or follow patterns. You can create a shield to temporarily blast through them, but it's on a tight recharge timing, so most of the time Wave Trip is about rising and falling - with style. You use a single touch to make pyramid-head rise up, and release to fall down; simplicity itself, but with a real subtlety when it comes to being exact.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:00:00 +0000
Knights of Pen & Paper review

This came out last summer, but I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of it until a festive App Store sale and snazzy icon tempted a punt. It turns out to be a rare treasure, a high-concept hybrid role-playing game that manages to pack an epic and funny quest into the most unusual of structures.

The concept is that a group of friends are playing an old-school pen-and-paper RPG, like Dungeons & Dragons, and they along with the Dungeon Master make up the centrepiece of the screen - the latter facing the player from the other side of the table, while the friends sit with their backs to you. The table is a constant on-screen presence in Knights of Pen & Paper, and the fantasy world the friends are playing through is represented by everything outside of it: a series of beautiful pixel-art backdrops, all of them crammed with tiny details and movement.

Travelling from place to place changes the backdrop as well as the quests available, and is controlled through a simple map overlay. It costs in-game dollars to travel anywhere, which limits your initial movement, but before very long you'll have a truckload. Now seems as good a time as any to mention that Knights of Pen & Paper includes in-app purchases for more of its dollars, but you'll honestly never need them - every fight, more or less, rewards you with currency, and every quest yields even more.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:00:00 +0000
Temple Run 2 review

If Franz Kafka had been around to see video games, the infinite runner would be his genre of choice.

Canabalt, the title that single-handedly invented the smartphone-friendly single-button running genre in 2009, had a visual palette limited to dreary greys - rather suited to an apocalyptic game that invariably ends in your death.

In 2011, Temple Run took Canabalt's forever-running blueprint and installed it in a colourful 3D world where you recreate the opening scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark over and over again. Like Professor Jones, the protagonist of Temple Run is trying to escape with a sacred idol looted from an ancient ruin. Unlike Professor Jones' adventure, however, there ultimately is no escape - you will always die, and the reason for playing again is just to get a little farther before your grim demise. Somewhere, Kafka chuckles.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 21 Jan 2013 12:11:00 +0000
Wordament review


I'll be over here, playing the next big thing while I hang out with the cool kids. By next big thing, I mean Wordament. And by cool kids, I mean other middle-aged women and people who have never found anything useful to do with their English Literature degree other than play video games about spelling.

Actually, Wordament isn't new at all. It was first released for the Windows Phone platform in April 2011. But the iOS version came out just last month, complete with Xbox Live functionality. In other words, players sign in with their gamertags and there's no Game Center business at all. It's the first iOS game to feature Xbox Live Achievements.

Read more…

]]> Mon, 14 Jan 2013 12:01:00 +0000
App of the Day: Joe Danger Touch




Read more…

App of the Day: Super Ox Wars




Read more…

App of the Day: Middle Manager of Justice




Read more…

App of the Day: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City




Read more…

App of the Day: King of Dragon Pass

The idea of being a king is endlessly fascinating. What would you do? Who would you kill? And, most importantly, who can you trust? Worn down every day by myriad disputes, planning for the enemy at the gates, constantly paranoid about inside jobs. "What infinite heart's ease," moans Shakespeare's Henry V, "Must kings neglect, that private men enjoy?"

King of Dragon Pass is an old and quite remarkable text-based game about the long and tortuous route to the titular crown. At its beginnings you take control of a small clan that settle into an unremarkable position in Dragon Pass, choosing their beliefs and lore in a brief history. From here everything is your decision, meaning that, apart from some helpful advice from a clan ring of seven, everything that goes wrong is down to you.

First released in 1999 on PC, this reworked version somewhat streamlines the original's interface as well as making the detailed art look immeasurably superior. King of Dragon Pass plays out through static interface screens that cover everything from trading caravans to building temples, and its plentiful incidents are communicated entirely through pictures and text. If you have thoughts of Zork or similar old-school text adventures, put them aside. What distinguishes the game is its non-linearity, huge range of situations to deal with, and the way these combine into quite incredible consequences. Basically it's like reading a choose-your-own-adventure book, with a strategy sim between the lines.

Read more…

]]> Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:00:00 +0000
App of the Day: Dream of Pixels




Read more…

App of the Day: Neuroshima Hex




Read more…

The Walking Dead review

There's a deliberate and sad irony to the title of The Walking Dead. On the surface, it refers to the shambling undead that have overrun the American South (and for all we know, the rest of the world besides); the survivors call them "walkers". But in the unflinching vision of a zombie apocalypse outlined by writer Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard in their comic-book series - now adapted for TV as well as into this episodic adventure game by Telltale Games - it also applies to the survivors themselves.

They're alive but not living, ghosts haunting an empty purgatory, delaying the inevitable. They're doomed more by their mistrust of each other than by the zombie threat. Only the very faintest glimmer of hope illuminates this bleak world - a trait it shares with the best post-apocalyptic fiction, from Cormac McCarthy's The Road back to John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids. This also sets it apart from the thematic tidal wave of zombies which has overwhelmed pop culture in the past decade or so, most of it not much more than a grisly backdrop for standard action and adventure.

Perhaps the best thing you can say about Telltale's The Walking Dead - which spins its own yarn, rather than following the comic as the TV show does - is that it never loses sight of this. Sure, you'll click on zombies' heads to stove them in and hammer buttons in desperate quick-time events. But these sequences are about as relevant as the cut-scenes are to most action games. This is never a game about battling zombies. It's about negotiating human relationships when they're strained to breaking point - and making the impossible, horrifying decisions that a survivor has to.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 22 Nov 2012 18:06:00 +0000
Karateka review

Mariko, just like every winsome princess trapped against her will in a castle, longs to be rescued. But being rescued isn't her only longing. There is, of course, the delicate matter of the rescuer.

Salvation is all well and good, but the specifics of the saviour are just as important. Who's the face behind the silhouette in the doorway; what's the torso beneath the shirt? A/S/L? Oh, there'll be smiles and grateful flutters of eyelashes no matter who topples the guard and bursts triumphant into the bedroom, but the man (or woman) should match the moment. Anyone else - unmentionably, unthinkably - might bring disappointment as well as freedom.

'Rescue the princess' is a premise as old as video-game time; at least as old as Karateka, a game originally released in 1984 when its maker, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, was a student at Yale University. But Karateka plays with the premise in a way few of its descendants have dared - ensuring this remake still feels unfamiliar some 30 years later.

Read more…

]]> Fri, 09 Nov 2012 11:00:00 +0000
App of the Day: Borderlands Legends HD




Read more…

App of the Day: Buddha Finger




Read more…

App of the Day: Girls Like Robots




Read more…

App of the Day: Kumo Lumo




Read more…

iPhone 5 review

It would be too easy to focus on the immediately apparent shortcomings of the new iPhone 5 and the latest iOS 6 update. The complete removal of the essential YouTube app and the introduction of the distressingly poor maps tool are massive own-goals that even the most ardent of Apple fans find hard to justify. The iPhone maker has a big problem with Google and it has decided to put corporate self-interest ahead of the customer, fobbing off the userbase with fudges, compromises and omissions that impact significantly on the functionality of the device.

We'll get that out of the way first because in all other areas the iPhone 5 is a superb piece of technology - and arguably the best smartphone on the market right now. It's not quite good enough to justify the eye-wateringly expensive upgrade from the existing 4S but run the phone side-by-side with virtually any 2010-vintage handset and the difference is obvious.

We came to the iPhone 5 fresh from testing out a range of other devices, from the bulky, plodding Xperia Play to the powerful Samsung Galaxy S3 and the small but beautifully formed iPhone 4S. The new Apple product is remarkable in comparison to all of them: it's by far the lightest of the lot, to the point where you can slip it into your shirt pocket and almost forget that it's there.

Read more…

]]> Sun, 23 Sep 2012 14:26:00 +0100
App of the Day: Rayman Jungle Run




Read more…

App of the Day: Final Fantasy: Dimensions

Irrespective of your opinion on Square Enix's more recent Final Fantasy efforts, it's impossible to deny the astonishing and far-reaching influence the franchise has had on RPGs in general. The early NES-based outings defined the boundaries of the genre, while the seminal 16-bit instalments of the '90s and the global smash hit that was Final Fantasy VII would propel the brand into the stratosphere. Born out of Hironobu Sakaguchi's anxiety to score a significant hit before jacking in game development altogether, Final Fantasy is arguably the only Japanese RPG to ever gain truly worldwide acceptance.

Bearing this in mind, the prospect of playing an entry in this esteemed lineage which not only celebrates past classics but also provides an entirely new story should fill each and every fan with near-uncontrollable excitement, yet Square Enix's announcement of Final Fantasy: Dimensions has been met with an uncharacteristically muted reception. The most obvious reason for this curious reaction is the game's quite monstrous price tag, which makes previous Square Enix iOS releases look like chump change in comparison.

Although the game costs nothing to download, you only get to play the prologue for free. After this initial section is complete - it totals about an hour - you're plunged headfirst into in-app purchasing territory. Final Fantasy Dimensions is divided into four chunks, the first of which costs a modest £1.99 and covers around five hours of gameplay. So far, so good. However, the remaining three instalments are weightier and consequently demand more cash: £6.99 a pop, to be precise.

Read more…

]]> Thu, 13 Sep 2012 12:00:00 +0100
App of the Day: Super Hexagon




Read more…

App of the Day: Zookeeper Battle




Read more…

App of the Day: Organ Trail: Director's Cut




Read more…

App of the Day: Human Defense




Read more…
