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Magic Cube’s Infect Them All holds a special spot in my heart. It was released around the time I started loosing faith in casual iOS gaming. More and more developers were diving into the IAP scene, making games that pretty much showed gamers how they were truly viewed as consumers instead of gamers or fans. Then along came Infect Them All from a company I previously hadn’t heard anything about, and I was hooked.

Now, after hours upon hours of gameplay with Infect Them All, Magic Cube’s sequel, Infect Them All: Vampires has just been released. There’s not too much of a difference between the two titles, they both include a Campaign, Infinite Campaign, Survival, and Blitz Modes, they both control the same with either tilt or virtual joystick options, can both have a whole lot of enemies on the screen at once, both have 50 Campaign levels, awesome boss battles, and more. The biggest difference you’ll notice at first is that ITA: Vampires gives your character a special ability. With your first character, you’re able to attack humans by hitting an attack button, causing your vampire to jump and slash twice in the direction you’re tilting or pressing on the joystick. After you attack humans, a reaper will appear above all of them that were in your way, and you can either let them die, or jump on them quickly to infect them, making large groups of humans easy targets.

As in the original Infect Them All, you will need to infect a certain amount of humans before Survival and Blitz Modes are unlocked; 5,000 to unlock Survival, and 7,500 for Blitz. It does seem like quite a bit, but after you get through the first couple of levels, infecting 30 humans a stage is not too hard, and much, much more (up to about 75) in the later levels, all of which are re-playable, will unlock the extra modes in no time. The two extra characters are also unlocked based on how many humans you infect. The first character unlocks at 1,000, and the second at 3.000, so you’ll have all 3 characters to play with before you unlock the extra modes, giving you adequate time to upgrade all their skills and abilities before taking on the harder modes.

Infect Them All: Vampries is supported by GameCenter and OpenFeint, having leaderboards for each of the game’s modes, and 23 achievements. Considering you can re-play levels, the main boards most gamers will be competing on will be the Survival and Blitz boards. But if you want to play and re-play levels, trying to get into the top 10 or so scores for the Campaign Mode, get ready to sink a good 40 hours into the game. At $0.99, it’s a great buy, especially if you enjoyed the original Infect Them All.

Amid the frenzy of price drops, Tiny Defense has gone completely free as part of the Blacksmith Games Appvent Calendar.  If you don’t already own it definitely pick it up now.

“Tiny Defense takes the tried and tested tower defense genre and puts it onto a 2D playing field. It works a treat and comes out as one of the very best in its class.” – 148Apps.com

“This tactical defense game is entertaining and addictive. There is nothing not to love about it.” – AppAdvice.com

“If you’re a fan of games like Plants vs Zombies and you’re looking to try anything with a remotely similar gameplay experience, then Tiny Defense will certainly satisfy that urge.” – TouchArcade

“Tiny Defense is one of the first tower defense titles that I’ve played that meets up to the expectations of P vs Z.” – AppStoreArcade

“I like it! Cute, Mario-esque graphics, PvZ gameplay, ample content.” – ArcadeLife

Tunnel racers are fairly popular on the iDevice. The utilization of tilt controls, along with pretty simple gameplay appeals to casual and hardcore gamers alike. The most recent addition to this genre is Gripati Digital Entertainment’s Corridor Fly.

The game does take a little bit of getting use to. You’re able to fly all around the tunnel you’ll be racing through by using the iDevice’s accelerometer controls, along with a button on the bottom left to tilt your aircraft sideways, and a button on the bottom right to use whatever power-up you might have stored. This wouldn’t normally be too hard to get acclimated to, but Corridor Fly’s collision detection seems to be more than just a tad off, and with the doors closing in on you as you try and make it through them. But usually, you’ll end up crashing without touching anything. It’s the worst when you’re basically right in the center of the tunnel, and the doors are just starting to move towards you from the sides, and your ship blows up with just the edges of the doors showing. This is even more upsetting because the trailer doesn’t really show the collision detection as being this bad.

Now, I guess all of this isn’t so bad. If you play the game enough, you should eventually learn how to get your ship through doors, and deal with the poor collision detection, as well as get good enough to earn enough stars to maybe unlock the ship that costs 2. But you might not even get that far. The loading screen takes, literally, a minute and a half to load on a 4th gen device. With the graphics far from being amazing, and the gameplay usually lasting about 20 seconds, most people will not sit and wait over a minute for the game to load.

All of this seems really bad, and it kind of is. With the amount of really good tunnel racers out there, it’s hard to recommend Corridor Fly. All of these issues could be fixed in an update, and hopefully they all will, but it’s not looking promising, with no iTunes reviews, and only 34 GameCenter scores, it doesn’t look like sales will be pushing a quick update to be submitted, if at all, but if one does come, you know that we’ll keep you informed of it.

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On every day before Christmas we will give away 2 promo codes of any game to all of our deserving site visitors. We will contact you through the way you entered and deliver the promo code into your hands at exactly 4:00(or later)

You can enter in one of three ways:

• Tweeting about the site or the contest. Include our account name in your tweet (@TheAppShack) 

Sample Tweet – Follow @TheAppShack for your chance to win codes every day including EPOCH and Mage Gauntlet. 2 winners a day.

• Liking us on Facebook. (Email us with the name you liked us under)
• Emailing us at TheAppShack@gmail.com with suggestions and tips for the giveaway or the site in general.

Be sure to follow our Twitter account to stay up to date on what apps are included in the giveaway and who won the latest contest.

Promo Codes you could win:
Flight Unlimited (3 codes)
Commander Pixman (4 codes)
EPOCH. (3 codes)
Mage Gauntlet (2 codes)
Fargoal (5 codes)
Saucelifter (5 codes)
Phoenix(10 codes)
Cosmic Cab (1 code)
Bridge the Gap (1 code)
More apps will be added to the contest shortly

Shoot-em-ups have become a fairly popular genre within the iOS gaming crowd. Thankfully, the 3rd person rail-shooter genre hasn’t been left out of this revolution. Games like Dark Break, Denizen, ExZeus, TheMars and the more open ended Battle 3D: Robots Sky have given iOS gamers endless hours of Space Harrier type 3rd person rail-shooting excitement, though sadly, it’s far from the amount of shmups that can be found within the AppStore. Hopefully with the growing hardware, more and more 3rd person rail shooters will be developed. Until then, we can add Wizard Ops to this small list of games, developed by Phyken, you’ll guide a Wizard through 6 levels of hectic action, as well as have an endless survival level to try and play through.

Granted, 6 levels does seem short, but the replay value is fairly high, and there’s apparently more levels coming in the future, and at the current price-point, it’s hard to get upset when the 6 levels can be played over and over again to earn more coins which let you unlock any of the 18 total weapons that you can mix and match, equipping 2 at a time, along with the endless survival level offering up hours upon hours of gameplay.

Now, I’ve already said that there’s 18 weapons, but getting into them while talking about the controls is probably a good idea, because there’s quite a few of them that auto-target, but in a nice way. You won’t be able to just stand there and let these auto-target weapons go to town on all the enemies, instead, you’ll need to scroll over the enemy with your aim, in order to enable auto-targeting. Other than that, almost all of your weapons will shoot straight in-front of where your character is. There are a couple that toss out bombs, or have a spread shot, but basically, you’ll be shooting right in front of your character, and with the 3D onslaught of bullets coming your way, actually getting enough shots off to kill the enemies can sometimes be a challenge, especially in survival mode, where the difficulty ramps up fairly quickly. There will be some gamers out there who feel that the 6 regular levels are fairly easy, especially those of you who are in to bullet hell gaming, but not to worry, the survival mode has the difficulty to keep you hooked for quite some time.

There are pick-ups in the game, with each enemy dropping a bronze, silver, or gold coin, health drops, and even some guns are dropped in-game. If you already have the gun, however, it will automatically be sold, usually for about 300 coins. A major difference with the survival mode is that there are no health drops. So along with even more hectic bullet play, and an increasing difficulty, you won’t be able to regain health, adding even more of a challenge to the endless play.

For those of you who are worried about IAPs, and are wondering if this game’s shop is pushed towards them, you can take a deep breath, and rest easy. There’s NONE. That’s right, an out-right FULL game for $0.99. Better yet? It’s Universal! And aside from the short regular campaign time, having only 6 levels, it’s hard to even bring that up as an issue since they’re all replayable, there’s an endless survival level, and there’s more levels to come. If you’re a fan of 3rd person rail shooters, or even if you aren’t big on them, but love action filled arcade-based games, Wizard Ops is definitely a title that deserves some attention. I, for one, am really hoping that it sells well so that not only can we get the planned more content, but also see more from developer Phyken. The game looks great, plays great, has tons of action, and essentially endless replayabilty, all without any added IAPs, what’s not to like?