Reckless behavior will get you many undesirable places in life like the bottom of a toilet, top of a building, and being chased by twenty cop cars. In this game being reckless is your main goal and destroying tons of cars with a awesome maneuver will certainly put a smile on any ones face. With lots of content including 17 levels, 2 game modes, and 2 different cars the fun wont be coming to a halt anytime soon.
The main catching point that got me hooked on this game is the floaty physics. Sure some people like down-to-earth physics that make games play like a rock but the physics in this game let it have that extra element of unpredictability. The two modes I mentioned before are Getaway and Wreckless. Getaway is basically the main campaign of the game. There are 4 different sets of levels each consisting of 4 levels each. These sets of levels have their own backstory and their own environmental theme like the dessert for instance. You unlock new levels and modes by earning stars in the previous levels. A star meter fills up depending on how many coins you pick up along the route and how much destruction you caused while driving….recklessly. Hidden along the level are little sub routes that deviate from the main course of the level. Often you will find way more coins and quickly elevate your star total if you can find them.
The second game mode, Wreckless is designed for the more destructive type. You are outfitted with a big rig and in order to gain the stars mentioned previously you have to destroy as many cars as you can which as you can imagine is amazingly fun. In both modes there are various power ups located randomly around the track. It’s the star rating system that really gives the game good replay value but after you complete everything there is little else substantial to work your way up to besides the GameCenter achievements. Fortunately the overall fun of the game makes up for that discrepancy and works this game to the top of my favorite games list. I highly recommend you check out this awesome and action packed game.
Overall Rating
Price: 2.99
Replayability: 8/10
Content: 8/10
Difficulty: Ranges per each level but is by no means a difficult game.
Overall Awesomeness Factor: 9/10
Percent Chance you will enjoy it: 90%
Ratio of Explosions to Overall crashes: 34/12
Chance we didn’t make up these statistics: 1000 to 1
Fly Wars: Conflict is a new action strategy game from B&C Mobile. In it, you will move flies around each level, shooting other flies, and collecting poo, trying to kill the enemies before they kill you, and getting the best score you can. There’s blocks that you’ll need to shoot through, break, and bounce your bullets off of in order to defeat the other team, but the controls are somewhat finicky, making the gameplay harder than it needs to be.
To control your fly, you’ll need to tap on it, and then tap on where you want them to go. Aiming is done with a bar on the right side of the screen, but you can only shoot in about a 45 degree area. Now, if you’re aiming, and you try to tap on your fly to move it, you can’t. The game has one touch controls, and can get pretty annoying, even in the early levels. In a game like Fly Wars, where you need to move to different areas of the screen and set up your shots as quick as you can, having a multi-touch interface is almost a necessity.
Aside from the control issues, Fly Wars looks decent, and does have some pretty nice strategic gameplay. It might be hard to understand how to play at first, as the developer is not a native English speaker, and the instructions are pretty hard to understand, but once you catch on, which should be pretty quickly, it’s a piece of cake to play. You start off with the lowest level fly, who can only fire one bullet at a time. You’re also occasionally given helper flies that you can not move or control. After progressing through 3 levels, you’ll get the next fly up, that can fire two bullets at a time, and then every 3 levels after that, a stronger fly is unlocked. You’re given a total of 6 slots for flies, but you only start off with 1 slot open. Slots then open up about every 10 levels, so by level 11, you’ll be controlling 2 different flies.
The levels are split up in groups of 10, with 90 stages total. Each group of 10 levels is set in a different environment, with different objects to bounce your bullets off of as you move on, some of which are really pretty interesting, and do add quite a bit to the gameplay. The backgrounds aren’t really anything too special, but do fit the graphical style, and are noticeably different as you move on.
It does have a GameCenter leader board for your total score, but aside from that, there’s no achievements, and no real reason to replay any of the levels unless you die before beating them, so it’s a good thing there’s 90 levels. The scoring is alright, and the graphics are good. You’ll probably fight with the controls in the beginning, but once you get the hang of it, the gameplay does get better. For $0.99, it’s a good strategy action game, and if you’re into the genre, it’s a game that’s definitely worth checking out. There’s tons of objects that do make the gameplay very interesting as you progress through the game, and with the 90 levels, it’ll take quite a while to finish the game. I am looking forward to updates that will hopefully add some multi-touch controls, and am very interested in seeing what B&C comes up with next.
Fly Wars: Conflict is getting a score of 8 out of 10.
Tapsteroids is the first iOS game from UNAgames, a two person team based in Italy. Daniele, who worked for 7 years on high-budget games for the Amiga, PC, and first-generation consoles, and Erika, a mathematician who works on 2D and 3D graphics. After playing Tapsteroids, hearing this information doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. The action filled tap/arcade game has that ‘one more play’ feel to it, and it is made extremely well, with loads of polish, and tons of challenge.
In Tapsteroids, it’s your job to keep navigation routs safe to travel by wiping out waves of asteroids that are hurtling through space. To do this, you’ll be given an unlimited number of missiles, and are able to pick up extra weapons as you progress through the levels. To get rid of the asteroids, all you need to do is tap on them, and which-ever weapon you have equipped will automatically fire at it. The extra weapons are picked up by tapping on them, and selected by tapping on the space station, pausing the game, and then tapping on the weapon you’d like to use.
To get through each level, you’ll need to make sure that a certain number of ships are able to dock on your space station safely. You’re given 5 shields, or hit points, and each time your station or a ship gets hit by an asteroid, you loose one of those shields. Scattered in with the weapon pick-ups, you’ll see shield pick-ups as well, which add on one hit point.
The graphics in Tapsteroids are done extremely well, and the space environments look really nice. The animations for the asteroids, space ships, weapons, and different space stations are done very well also. There’s tons of polish and professionalism throughout the graphics and animations, and really helps add to the atmosphere and feel of the game. There plenty of variation between the space stations, space ships, and with the asteroids. Small asteroids, medium asteroids, and larger asteroids will fill up the screen in the later levels, some of them breaking up into multiple smaller asteroids, going in every direction. There is music in-between levels, and on the menus, but while playing, you’ll only hear the effects of weapons firing, ships landing, and asteroids and space ships exploding. The menu music is really nice, and full of energy, and the lack of music in-game actually helps build some atmosphere in my opinion. Space is a lonely, quiet place; only having the effects sounds while playing was a great idea.
There are three difficulties in Tapsteroids, but when you’re playing, the difficulty automatically goes up as you progress through the game. Easy difficulty is levels 1 through 4, Medium is 5 through 9 and Hard is 10 and up. Selecting Medium or Hard difficulty at the beginning of a game will automatically start you at level 5 or 10. This might turn some people off, but if you’re into older games, and love the difficulty levels of old-school NES/SNES and SEGA games, you’ll probably feel right at home with Tapsteroids.
Only having one mode is something else that might turn people off. An endless or survival mode would be awesome to have, but as it is now, Tapsteroids is a very entertaining game, with tons of replay value. The GameCenter leaderboards and 21 achievements help add to that too. It’s a very professional game with loads of polish, and tons of potential for the future. If the developers keep adding to the game, this could easily turn into one of my favorite arcade tapers for the iOS. $0.99 is a great price for endless gameplay, and tons of action. Get it now, and start climbing up those leaderboards!!
Defen-G Astro is a new action defense game from Innodis in which you place characters alongside and on top of each other along the 2D levels to protect your tower from being attacked by wave after wave of enemies. The gameplay is simple enough, you select your character from the available characters at the bottom of the screen, and then place them anywhere where a shadow of the character appears on the battlefield. You can tap on the character to upgrade them, up to 3 times, or sell them for a fraction of what they cost, with each character, and upgrade, costing a certain amount of stars. Then you defend the tower behind you while wave after wave of enemies come at you, replacing characters, or units, if the enemies defeat them. It’s like a 2D version of Defense Of Fortune.
The controls are simple, and really, these types of games work extremely well on touch screen devices. Tap, tap, tap tap, tap. As you progress throughout the game, you’ll collect more units, and abilities which are stored on the top of the screen automatically, and can be used by tapping on them once they’re charged. There’s defensive abilities, kept on the top left of the screen, and also some magic spells, which are placed on the top right of the screen. These abilities range from Health and Shields to Extra Stars that when tapped on, spit stars out at you that you’ll need to tap on to collect. These charge during battle, as well as get quick recharges from enemies that drop refill orbs. The characters/units, are also picked up while you progress throughout the game. After starting with 2 units, you’ll eventually build up your units, and be able to select which ones you’ll want to use in each battle.
The graphics in Defen-G Astro are very nicely done, and very polished, with environments being vibrant, but easy to see the action played out against them. Animations are done extremely well, and look great. From the movement to the death animations, everything is done in a very professional manor. The level select screen is placed in space, where you’ll move from star to star going through constellations, finishing each of the levels, and completing the shape of each one. This is kind of strange, because the level select screen shows you battling on stars, but the backdrops for each level are usually snow-caped mountain tops, open fields, or volcano scorched landscapes that don’t really reflect you battling it out on a star. Then again, having a backdrop of space with a couple stars in it would get pretty boring very quickly.
To top it off, Defen-G Astro is GameCenter supported, giving us two leaderboards, one for the campaign mode, and being your total score built up throughout the game, and the other for your high Infinite Mode score. Infinite Mode being an endless battle that you play until your tower is destroyed. However, there are no achievements, so you achievement hunters out there are kind of out of luck. But with the addition of Infinite Mode, generally one of my favorite modes in these types of RTS/Defense games, and the ability to replay each of the levels with one of 3 difficulties, there’s an unlimited amount of replay value, limited only by your desire to play the game. Defen-G Astro is a very polished, very entertaining, and challenging action defense game, one that’s actually quickly becoming one of my favorite RTS games on my device. For $2.99, it’s got tons of content, and loads of gameplay, and is definitely a game that all fans of the genre should pick up.
VenomBlast is an updated, re-release of Pictosoft’s shmup, Zapa Ray. Pictosoft has done a pretty nice overhaul of the original game, giving us better graphics, different sounds, IAPs, a special fighter ship, and loads of tweaks. There’s also 3 hidden levels, unlocked after you beat the game on Normal, Hard, and Hell difficulties. Getting through Normal will be a challenge in itself though.
VenomBlast is a great looking shoot-em-up, with beautiful environments, and loads of variation with the enemies, in fact, there’s over 100 different types of enemies throughout the whole game. The boss battles are huge, and very well scripted, and can throw out some pretty nasty bullet sprays. To make things clear, even though there are tons of bullets fired in VenomBlast, it is not a bullet hell game. The scoring is simple, with each enemy having a set score for killing it, and no multipliers or bonuses are given. There’s also no real bullet patterns, all of the bullets are shot depending on where you’re positioned on the screen. This setting might upset some people, as having more bullets and bullet sprays on the screen doesn’t necessarily make for a better game. Bullet Hell games have eye candy bullet patterns, that can weave in and out with each other, and that you can dodge through if you know what to look for, and know what the patterns are going to be like. With huge bullet sprays shot directly at you, there’s not a specific way to weave through the bullets, you’ll just have to keep moving around, and with a little luck, not get stuck behind massive walls of undodgible bullet sprays.
Pictosoft has found a nice little solution to this problem though. Spotlight; the Fire Ball ship. In VenomBlast, you’re given 3 ships, one to start out with, and 2 to unlock with credits, all 3 being upgradeable. The original ship, named the Vulcan, is your typical shoot-em-up type fighter, having a strong blast, and wide spread once fully upgraded. The Guided Laser ship has projectiles that follow and hit ships anywhere on the screen; In front of you, behind you, or on either side of you. Then the Fire Ball ship shoots fire balls (go figure), and has fire balls that circle the ship. This spray of fire cancels out almost every type of bullet shot at you by enemies, and is a real life saver in the more hectic areas of the game. Each of the ships also fires missiles, that can be upgraded between levels, that lock on to enemies, and are pretty destructive.
The controls in VenomBlast are done pretty well, as we’re given relative touch controls, along with 2 buttons that can be placed on the right, left, or one one each side of the bottom of the screen. One button fires a nuke type shield that wipes out all bullets and most enemies when triggered, and the other button controls your ships, letting you switch between all 3 in the heat of battle. Double tapping on the screen lets you fire a bomb that clears out bullets, and causes massive damage. You only fire when you’re touching the screen though, and in a game that has numerous enemies coming at you from all directions, forcing you to pick up your thumb or finger in order to see them, this can be a real problem. Along with the buttons, the UI is made up of a battery symbol in the top right corner which is your health bar, a shield counter to the left of that, and your bomb counter next to the shields. Shields deploy automatically when you’re hit, and look like wings coming off of your ship, which is a nice little animation.
Compared to other iOS shmups, VenomBlast is a pretty hectic shooter, but it really has some stunning backgrounds and great animations with the enemies and even better with the bosses. There is an Easy Mode if you’re finding the game a little too hard, which is nice for new-comers to the genre, and your scores are shared on GameCenter throughout 5 different leaderboards, one for each difficulty, and one for all difficulties combined. The In-App-Purchases are for unlocking harder difficulties, extra lives, and buying more credits, each of which can be unlocked or bought in the between-levels store, so you’re not forced into buying anything extra unless you just want to pretty much skip ahead in the game. For $0.99, VenomBlast is a great shooter, definitely worth checking out, even if you purchased ZapaRay before it was pulled from the AppStore. It’s got plenty of challenge, and enough replay value added on with the extra bonus levels and leader boards to keep any veteran of the genre busy for quite some time.
Up And Up is a new slingshot type adventure platform game from Swift Seven Multimedia, a 2 person outfit located in Sweden. Up And Up is easily one of my favorite games to come out in the last couple months, and the attention it’s getting, or lack of, is pretty surprising. Maybe it shouldn’t be, as there’s quite a few games I feel really deserve a lot more attention then they’ve gotten, but I can almost always understand why. The controls might be a little funky for some people at first, people might have been expecting to get something else, but with Up And Up, it’s a pretty straight forward adventure game that has you stretch and slingshot your character through the beautifully made levels, is made by indie developers, and is made for both casual and hardcore gamers. These types of games usually do pretty well in the AppStore. Then again, most of the games in this genre weren’t released the same week as Jetpack Joyride, Samurai Bloodshow, Frogger Decades and Crimson: Steam Pirates. So here’s hoping I can shed a little bit more light on this great title.
In Up And Up, you’ll play as a bungy monster who’s trying to escape from the rising lava, falling bats, angry frogs, and more, while using objects, tools, and power-ups to help you get to safety. There’s 2 worlds, each with 15 levels to try and make your way through, collecting the 8 pieces of cheese, finding the golden bat, and trying to beat the secret level times for even higher scores and a better star rating.
The controls in Up And Up are great. Tight, responsive, and they work extremely well within the game. To get your bungy monster through each level, you’ll need to tap down on him, pull him back, and fling him towards the next hook, which he attaches to automatically, while if you miss a hook, you can hold down on the screen to activate a sort of helicopter ability, and then move your finger left or right to guide him to a hook. The physics and camera angles come into play quite a bit here, and they’re both great. Physics-wise, the game is awesome, with just enough gravity to have an effect on where you fling your character next, and when you miss, the helicopter ability works perfectly and feels great. The camera angle changes depending on the angle that you pull your character back at, for instance, pulling to the left makes the camera sort of pan in a 3D way to the right so that you can see more clearly what you’re aiming at. It might sound like it would distract from the gameplay, but really, it adds a lot to the game and the overall aesthetic.
The levels are just long enough to stay challenging, and upset you if you die right at the end, but not get frustrating when you have to replay them. The level design is also very, very good, and when you’re playing, you can tell that a lot of thought, effort, and beta testing went into each and every stage, as well as each and every move you can make while going through the stages. 30 levels might not sound like a lot, but it’ll sometimes take you multiple tries to get through most of them, and with the difficulty curve, will take a while to complete. There’s also another world with 15 levels coming in a future update.
The enemies are stylish, and varied, while having a pretty big impact on how you make your way through each of the levels. Sometimes you’ll need to quickly jump from one hook to another to avoid one falling on you, other times you’ll need to wait until it’s safe to move through an area, and sometimes you’ll just avoid spots completely. The objects that help are very well placed, and varied as well. Yellow hooks that let you do a super jump, and jetpacks that run on depleting fuel, which you can also pick up while riding them, can be found scattered throughout the levels, along with green goo to bounce off of on the sides of the walls, moving hooks and more.
The graphics are very nice, and environments are extremely colorful and visually pleasing. The game is also supported by Retina Display and is Universal, so you can experience the game in all it’s visual glory. S7 has certainly done everything right for their first release in order to leave a lasting and very nice mark on the AppStore gaming community, except for leaving out online services. They will be added very soon in an update, but leaving them out in the initial release, along with releasing it the same week as many other big name games, might just be why this game has been knocked to the back of the pack in terms of ‘must buy’ games. I, however, am very, very glad that I have been able to experience this game, as it’s definitely left it’s mark on me. I’m eagerly awaiting GC support, future levels, and whatever S7 has in store for gamers in the future. At $1.99, Up And Up is a must buy game.
Up And Up is getting a score of 9.5 out of 10, and would get a perfect 10/10 if it included online support in this v1.0 release. Once it’s added, this might just be the first review I end up changing the last paragraph of, and re-posting with a 10 out of 10 score after it gets updated.
Pocket Warriors is a new 2D side-scrolling action-RPG from Rainbow Game. You’re able to switch between two characters while you play, making the gameplay a little more interesting. It’s your job to keep the village safe from incoming monsters and enemies, while becoming stronger warriors. The game kind of plays like a 2D version of Monster Hunter, which isn’t really a bad thing at all. Rainbow Game has pulled it off quite well.
The controls for the game are simple, but work perfectly. You’re given movement buttons, left and right, which you don’t need to constantly pick your thumb up from to change directions, and 3 buttons, an attack, guard, and switch character button. To enter the stores, upgrade shops, or quest sections, the attack button changes to an enter button. Graphics-wise, Pocket Warriors is done in a professional manor, and looks very polished. The environments are varied, and there’s 15 different enemies along with huge bosses that are designed extremely well, along with pretty nice animations.
You start off in the village, and can talk to four different characters. An item storage lady, upgrade blacksmith, weapon shop panda, and the elder who hands out your quests. The quests need to be done in order, and each gives you a certain amount of gold when completed. To do the quest, you exit the village, and are taken directly to where you need to be in order to complete it. The quests are generally one of two options, kill X amount of enemies, or kill a boss. However, the lack of variety when it comes to the quests isn’t really a big deal, as you’ll need different strategies and items to defeat each different enemy, as well as each of the bosses. Combat is simple, with the attack and block buttons, you can also equip magical items up under your character avatars in the top left corner. These magical items can be bought in the shop, and do not drop during battle. More slots can be bought with the money you earn doing quests. Bosses do give off elemental items each time they’re knocked down, and you can use these to upgrade your weapons. There’s no exploration, no mixing items, or searching for other items, everything can be bought in the shop or won through a boss battle. There’s also loads of different weapons to buy and upgrade, each with different attributes and qualities.
The second character AI is pretty upsetting though. Sometimes the second character will hardly move at all, but when they do, they attack at about half the speed as when you’re doing the attacking, and almost always let enemies harm them. Being able to set up what you want a character to do, like in Final Fantasy, to attack, block, or just use the magical items, would have made the second character combat a lot better.
With 36 quests, each taking a couple minutes, some taking 4 or 5, the game doesn’t have very much gameplay, but it’s set-up in a way that new levels and quests can be added with updates pretty easily, so I’m really hoping for these types of updates in the future, and some tweaking of the second character AI is needed to really be helpful too. A scoring system would also be a very nice feature to see in the future, as well as online services, including leaderboards and achievements. It would also be extremely nice to see some defensive qualities added to the shops, for instance, some upgradeable armor, and shields Aside from this, Pocket Warriors is a great monster killing quest game, and what it has is done extremely well. For $2.99, it’s well worth having if you’re into the genre. For Rainbow Game, Pocket Warriors has definitely helped them make their mark on the action RPG scene, and I’ll be eagerly awaiting future updates, and future games from the company.
Pocket Warriors is getting a score of 8 out of 10.
Space Touch – The Touch Shooter is a new tap/arcade game from Alpha-Tauri Interactive. In it, you’ll be faced with wave after wave of enemies that are made up of 3 different colors, red, green, and blue, and you’ll need to match up the color of your tap to the color of the enemy in order to kill them. You’ll also switch between the tap play and joystick play. Between each wave of enemies, you’re able to control your ship with a joystick, and collect energy and bombs to help you get through the next wave of enemies. At the end of each level, you’ll face a color changing boss along with some side-kick enemies.
Alpha-Tauri Interactive has done a great job meshing the space shooter and tap arcade genres in Space Touch. The switch between gameplay modes is done very well, and the tap gameplay itself feels very good with the user interface that’s set up. You have color switch options in the bottom left corner of the screen, and once you get use to the set-up, you don’t really need to pay too much attention to in the heat of tap-battle. The enemies are varied, and the movement and animations are done extremely well.
Sometimes enemies will hide behind each other, and other times you’ll just need to learn their movement patterns. They can also move around 3 dimensionally, making three quarters of them unreachable for brief seconds of time. If you don’t kill the enemies quick enough, they start to shoot laser beams at you, taking away from your energy. Once your energy is depleted, you’ll need to start the level over again. After the first couple of levels, the action gets pretty intense, and you’ll be tapping away like crazy.
Along with this campaign mode, there’s 3 “classic” game modes. Each is endless, and you score as many points as you can before dying. There’s Asteroid, Out Of Energy, and Kamikaze Modes, each with different types of gameplay. In Asteroid Mode, you’ll control your ship with the joystick, and try to shoot down as many asteroids as you can. If you miss an asteroid, or your ship hits one, you’ll loose energy. In Out Of Energy Mode, you control your ship with your joystick again, but this time, your energy constantly drains, and you’ll need to maneuver around collecting as many energy balls as you can to try and stay alive. If you miss too many energy balls, your energy drains too quick, and it’s game over. In Kamikaze Mode, you’ll be faced with enemies that are not colored, and you’ll need to tap on them before they crash into you. These three extra endless modes add a lot to the replay value and high-score chasing parts of the game.
Space Touch is supported by OpenFeint and GameCenter, and you can select which service you’d like to use in the Profile section of the main menu. There’s leaderboards for each of the three endless modes, as well as for the campaign. There are no achievements, which would be nice, because most games have pretty good options for achievements. Like here, you could get an achievement for killing 500 red enemies, along with green and blue, or an achievement for finishing the campaign, or for collecting 100 bombs or 500 energy balls. Lots of possibilities, though it doesn’t take away too much from the gameplay, just a little from the replay value. The graphics in Space Touch are done very well, and each of the 11 campaign stages are varied in look and feel, and there is a very nice sci-fi atmosphere presented in the game. For $1.99, Space Touch is a very nice, professional looking game that plays great and can get very challenging. There’s plenty of replay value, and the controls are spot on. Aside from the lack of achievements, I really can’t say anything bad about what Alpha-Tauri Interactive has presented to us here, and I’m eagerly awaiting updates, and can’t wait to see what the developers come up with next.
Spooky Hoofs is a new endless runner from Gamesmold. In it, you guide a stagecoach through woods and marshes collecting orbs for power-ups and avoiding holes, monsters and bosses. The game is semi-level based, in that you will always start in one of 3 randomly generated “first-levels”, but then after the first 3 levels, and after you defeat 3 bosses in a row, you move onto the harder section of the game, seeing enemies and bosses that you will never see within the first 3 levels. The end of each level is sectioned off by a boss battle and then a quick ride past another tavern. Each of the levels is generated based on what power-ups you have, and what kind of enemies there are. For instance, if you’re in a section that doesn’t have a lot of holes, you’ll face more ground enemies. In a section with lots of holes, you’ll face more flying enemies, and in a section where you have the double jump power-up, you’ll face lots of long holes and a pretty decent mixture of both types of enemies. Each of the boss battle sections are scripted, so that the difficulty stays fair and the choreography of the bosses works with the jumps and shots. This intelligent random design makes the game extremely well balanced as you’re progressing through the endless run.
The graphics in Spooky Hoofs are great, and have a similar style to Castlevania, which is awesome, and it‘s given to us in retina display, which makes it even better. The animations for the stagecoach, enemies, and bosses are done extremely well, making the flow of the game, and the gameplay, feel very professional and polished. The scoring is also done very well, separated between distance and a kill score. Each enemy and boss has a different amount of points, which when defeated, are added to your kill score, in the top right corner, under your health, while the distance is shown in meters, and is in the center top part of the screen.
The controls are done very well, as are the physics. You’re given a whip-speed boost button is on the left side, and the jump is on the right. You can use the whip button to whip the horses, also killing any flying enemies that might be above you, and holding it down sends you bursting forward. You can also boost forward while you’re jumping, making jumping over the bigger holes a lot easier. The power-ups in Spooky Hoofs are done very well also. To activate them, you need to collect 3 of the same colored orbs. There’s Blue, Orange and Purple, while Red orbs just need to be collected once, and add to your health. Collecting 3 blue orbs turns your horses into flaming blue invincible beings, giving you 3 chances to run into and through enemies, killing them, and adding to your kill score. Orange orbs give you the ability to shoot projectiles at enemies by hitting the dash-whip button, giving you 9 shots for every 3 orbs you collect, and purple orbs, when 3 are collected, give your horses wings and 9 air jumps, which you’re able to use consistently until you run out, meaning you can stay in the air for 10 full jumps before it’s used up and you fall back down to the ground.
There’s 2 leaderboards supported by GameCenter, one for distance, and one for your kill score, and no achievements. Having no achievements kind of takes away from the replay value, but with the leaderboards, it doesn’t take away too much, as you’ll be trying to get further and further, seeing more and more varied enemies, and increasing both your distance and kill scores. For $0.99, Spooky Hoofs is a great endless runner with awesome graphics, and great power-ups, while the gothic vibe of the game makes it even better. This is one game that will be staying on my iPod for quite some time.
Dragon Of The Three Kingdoms is a new side-scrolling beat-em-up/hack-n-slash/action RPG from WaGame Technology. In it, you play as Zhao Yun as you battle against the Nanman Barbarians. The game really reminds me of Dynasty Warriors, but in a side-scrolling, old-school format. The graphics are awesome, and very reminiscent of the SNES/SEGA era, and the animations are great. Walking looks kinda funny, but it’s not distracting, and the fighting animations are very smooth and presented very well.
The controls in DOTTK are tight, responsive, and very easy to use. You move Zhao Yun with a joystick in the bottom left corner, and have an attack button on the bottom right side of the screen, with a skill attack button next to it. When you fill up your attack bar under your health bar, another button appears next to the skill button, and stays there until you tap on it. In that same area is where you tap to ride horses, and elephants. Turning around quickly to fight off enemies that swarm around you is very easy to do, and you’re never stuck mashing on the screen trying to turn around in a hurry so you don’t loose a bunch of health.
Right now, there is one pretty major bug/issue. Whenever you die, and try to retry from the last checkpoint, everything on the screen becomes unresponsive. The developers have said that they’re working on a fix for this, but it seems like this is something that should have been dealt with during some beta testing. It is a shame that if you die, you need to exit the game, remove it from your multitasking bar, and re-start from the beginning of the level, instead of at the last checkpoint. Hopefully the developers get this issue fixed soon, because it’s a pretty major bug.
Aside from that, the gameplay is pretty good. You go through the levels, hacking and slashing away at enemies. If you press the skill button, the action pauses, so you can take your time choosing which skill you’d like to use given the current situation on the screen. There’s vases, crates, and treasure chests scattered throughout the levels, each dropping gold, health, and flags. You can use the gold to buy accessories in the shop between levels, and the flags to use your skills. The enemies also have an item drop rate that’s reasonably decent, and sometimes you’ll come across a full meal that restores your health fully. However, in order to use a skill or your special attack, you’ll need to press forward on the joypad while pressing the buttons, and this can get pretty frustrating during hectic battle sequences.
There are also some power-ups, but these drop rates are pretty low. Some will give you stronger attacks, some will increase your defense, and things like that. You level up while progressing through the game, but another thing I would have liked to see is the health refilled when you level up. Right now, leveling up doesn’t really do anything but give you another attack and defense point, which in the battle sections, doesn’t really help too much. There are bosses at the end of each level, and defeating them can sometimes prove to be quite the challenge. But it’s not overly difficult, and reminds me of old-school beat-em-up games.
Dragon Of The Three Kingdoms does have a lot of content, especially for being $0.99. It’s a solid action RPG, with the addition of side-scrolling levels, and is definitely worth checking out. There’s plenty of variation with the bosses and enemies, and really hit’s the spot if you’re looking for a game that matches the gameplay and difficulty of old-school beat-em-ups from the NES and SNES eras. There is, however, very little replay value here. Maybe if you could unlock more characters at the end of the game or play on a harder difficulty, the drive to replay the game would be there, but as it is now, you’ll play it once, and probably end up deleting it.
Dragon Of The Three Kingdoms is getting a score of 7 out of 10.
Reckless behavior will get you many undesirable places in life like the bottom of a toilet, top of a building, and being chased by twenty cop cars. In this game being reckless is your main goal and destroying tons of cars with a awesome maneuver will certainly put a smile on any ones face. With lots of content including 17 levels, 2 game modes, and 2 different cars the fun wont be coming to a halt anytime soon.
These sets of levels have their own backstory and their own environmental theme like the dessert for instance. You unlock new levels and modes by earning stars in the previous levels. A star meter fills up depending on how many coins you pick up along the route and how much destruction you caused while driving….recklessly. Hidden along the level are little sub routes that deviate from the main course of the level. Often you will find way more coins and quickly elevate your star total if you can find them. 
It’s the star rating system that really gives the game good replay value but after you complete everything there is little else substantial to work your way up to besides the GameCenter achievements. Fortunately the overall fun of the game makes up for that discrepancy and works this game to the top of my favorite games list. I highly recommend you check out this awesome and action packed game.
