Monthly Archive: September 2011

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.

VenomBlast is getting a score of 9 out of 10.

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/venomblast/id452950951?mt=8

Pokemon has been at the root of most peoples early childhood and even later on in life.  Some feel ashamed to have once been a part of this huge phenomenon but others still embrace it today.  After much tension and debate over Nintendo porting over a Pokemon game to iOS they still remain stubborn and adamant to not let that happen.  Fortunately Puppysauraus, a game that plays similar to Pokemon has been released, but it is not the type of experience most imagined.

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From the first time you open up the game you realize that it is marketed towards the younger market.  The graphics are cutesy, the colors are vibrant and the creatures names are no where near threatening.  I remember my first thought being, I hope my friends don’t see me playing this.  But the game has turned into something of a guilty pleasure with me and some of my fond memories of playing Pokemon have been brought back to life.
You start off by being asked if you are a boy, girl or robot. Then you get to choose your skin color and then are off on your journey.  You receive your first Twee, which is the equivalent of a Pokemon and are briefed on the history of the game and why you are venturing out on your quest to stop/collect the Twees. Shortly thereafter you initiate your first battle.
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The battle system is quite unusual to say the least.  You can have up to 3 Twees on the battlefield at one time and can not switch others in its place if one retreats. Then you get to choose what move your Twee performs on its opponent. There are many different attacks like “Bap”, “Tag”, and Freeze all of which correspond with a cute little animation of your character doing that to the other Twee.  Needless to say as this is a kids game, none of the creatures get harmed and the attacks are done in good fun which is where the over cutesy nature really struck me cold. Then you can try to catch wild Twee which appear randomly across the map. To catch a Twee you don’t use a Ball or kind of catching mechanism. You make them your friends by performing specialty moves like “Nuzzle”, “Dance” and others to make their love meter fill up and thus join your team of Twee.  To initiate one of these battles you have to run into a sparkly portal found randomly around the wild area you are in.  If you clear an area of all the Twees you get a special reward.  You control your character with the aid of a joystick which feels fairly responsive.  From a menu you can change your Twee Team, tweak the settings, and check your teams stats.  When you want to quit all you have to do is exit out of the app and it will save exactly where you were when you left.  Included with the game is the ability to upload your own drawings into the Twee world for others to catch and battle.  All you need is any drawing app like Doodle Buddy or Sketchbook and your ready to draw!
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The music is amazing and really gives the game an epic soundtrack.  The sound effects are a little annoying in battle but I got used to it after a few matches. Visuals are as mentioned before, geared towards kids and are very pastel colored in nature. In-game Menus on the other hand leave a little to be desired.  The standby Twee menu utilizes the basic blue and white list menu which does not correspond with the mood the game has set.  My only other complaint is that I would like to see a clothes and hair shop where you can change the look of your character and thus personalize your experience.
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Overall if your into Pokemon or just want to be a kid again then this is the game for you.  Just don’t let your friends see you playing it! I give it a 4.5/5.
Itunes Link: http://itunes.apple.com/app/puppysaurus/id432228575?mt=8

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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.

Defen-G Astro is getting a score of 9 out of 10.

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/defen-g-astro/id450698191?mt=8

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 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.

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/up-and-up!/id459530491?mt=8

Deliver Da Bomb is a new arcade game from Tapstatic in which you try to bounce a bomb from one side of the screen to the other side, blowing up a robot. It sounds pretty easy, and in the beginning it really is, as you can get enough bombs to the robot by just starting the first two bombs moving, and then tapping on the last group of men, then the middle group, then the first group, then back to the end and starting over again. The first 8 levels or so are played like this, but then you hit level 9, and it really starts to get difficult, especially on insane speed. Here is where they actually mix up the bombs shot by how high they start off, how fast they move, and in what order you need to tap the men in.

There’s two different game modes in Deliver Da Bomb, but they’re split up like difficulties. In Easy Mode, you’ll need to bounce bombs 3 times before they reach the robot, and in Hard Difficulty, you’ll need to bounce the bombs 4 times. With each of the difficulty modes you’re able to choose between 3 different speeds, Casual, Advanced, and Insane. Then to be able to play on Hard Mode, you’ll need to finish all the Easy Mode levels first, so it’s more set up like one mode that you just progress through in two, 25 level sections. Each bomb that you get to the end, hitting the robot, gives you one extra life point, and you can have up to 30 points for life. If you miss or drop a bomb, one point is taken away, and if you reach a life score of 0, surprise, game over.

The graphics are done fairly well, in a sort of NES-SNES retro type way, and the animations for movement, bouncing, and explosions are about what you would expect with a retro styled game. You are able to put a picture in the face of the robot, but it’s really small, so if you want it to be a picture that you’re able to see, it’ll have to be a close-up of something, or someone, and I prefer the default robot face. The sounds and music is inspired by old-school effects and music as well, and fit’s the game well enough.

Deliver Da Bomb is presented as an old-school arcade game that you can battle for a high-score ranking through GameCenter on, but there’s one pretty major problem with the scoring system; your score is cumulative, and adds up continuously. This means that you can raise your score to 50 thousand just by playing level 1 over and over again, if you so desire, but also that the #1 position on the GameCenter charts will not be the person who scored the most points in each of the 50 levels, but instead, will be the person who played the game more than anyone else, For a game who’s primary reason for playing is for getting a high score, this is a pretty big let-down, and to top it off, and really make sure the replay value goes down the drain, there’s no achievements.

Tapstatic has done a great job creating a high-scoring retro arcade game with Deliver Da Bomb, but it seems like they did a poor job in implementing the scoring system and GameCenter integration. However, these things could be easily fixed in a future update, and for $0.99, Deliver Da Bomb does deliver quite a bit of challenging gameplay, and is definitely worth the price.

Deliver Da Bomb is getting a score of 6 out of 10, with a little asterisk ** if this game is updated, and the scoring system is fixed so that you have a score fixed for each level that you can raise up by replaying the level instead of just adding to your total score by replaying a level over and over, it could be a 7 or 8 out of 10 game, and if more game modes are added after that, could easily score 9 or 10 out of 10 – and I do have some pretty high hopes for this one.

 I think we all can agree that this August has been an awesome month for game releases and many of my favorites have gotten sequels that drastically reinvented themselves.  There have also been alot of other unique releases that deserve mention as well.   Ladies and Gentlemen this is..The Best of the Best!

Pocket RPG-(Crescent Moon Games) 0.99

Though  released on the iPad before the iPod, this Wednesday it was made Universal. Pocket RPG is now fast becoming our favorite game with three different characters and tons of exploring and looting to do you’ll be spending all your free time with this amazing game. App Store Link

Mega Mall Story-(Kairosoft) 3.99

 If you’ve ever wondered what it would feel like to be the manager of a mall then this game is for you.  It puts all the elements of business and turns them into something extremely fun.  You can build shops, invest in the surrounding community and expand your very own mall.  Pick this one up today! App Store Link

Jetpack Joyride-(Halfbrick) 0.99

There’s no doubt about it that Halfbrick has done it again. This has got to be one of the best releases all summer. Do whatever you have to do to get this game. You won’t regret this purchase. This is truly a fun and addictive game. By addictive I mean you will literally be hooked on this game for hours and hours and hours… well you get it. Go download it now! App Store Link

Edge Extended- (Mobigame) 0.99
Based off of the success of the very first Edge Mobigame went and made a sequel to that game. This definitely feels like a true sequel and is true to the originals length and complexity.  To read up more on this game check out our Review of it.
 App Store Link

Contre Jour- (Mokus) 0.99
 
A blend of game and interactive art this breathtaking puzzler is one of the most innovative games we have ever seen.  With a blend of Cut the Rope, Angry Birds, and other games mechanics you’ll surely be entertained! App Store Link

Infinty Field-(ForzeField) 0.99
This is the first dual stick shooters that has actually stuck on my device for more than a week and is perfect for those few fleeting moments you have during your bathroom breaks and when your teacher is looking the other way.  All in all I highly suggest you try this game out for the low asking price of 0.99.  I promise you wont be disappointed. App Store Link

Temple Run- (Imangi) 0.99
Endless runners are a well done genre in the App Store but this game takes a turn where few other dare to go….3D.  You are frantically running away from the angry temple guardians who feel you violated the sanctity of their temple. By swiping you jump, turn and slide around all sorts of obstacles and passages. The replayabiltiy is off the hook and I have once spent 2 hours straight playing the game.  I highly recommend you try this for the low cost of 0.99. App Store Link

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.

Spooky Hoofs is getting a score of 9 out of 10.

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spooky-hoofs/id455577493?mt=8

Spin The Nut is a new puzzle game from P-O-M Apps in which you try and get an acorn to the end of the level to feed the squirrel. You’ll also try and collect 3 golden nuts while getting the acorn to the end. The quicker you collect the golden nuts and make it to the squirrel, the better your score will be.

We’re given 80 nicely designed levels to try and get through, spread across 4 different worlds, with plenty of different objects to have the acorn interact with along the way, like bouncy platforms that are stationary, and then later in the game become platforms that you can move, spikes, helicopter baskets, pieces of wood that break after using them once, signs that will change the direction of the acorn while it’s in the air, and loads more.

The controls in Spin The Nut are done very well. To shoot the acorn, you place your finger on the piece of spinning wood that it’s stuck to, and then slide your finger away from the acorn so that you can see which direction it’s pointing. When it’s aimed in the direction that you want it to go, you let go of the screen, and it’ll shoot forward. There’s no gravity, so you don’t need to account for that, and the acorn will automatically stick to the next piece of wood it comes in contact with. Later in the game you’re also able to move the rotating pieces of wood that the acorn sticks to by single tapping on it to move it, and double tapping on it to activate the firing ability.

The graphics in Spin The Nut are polished and professional, and look very good. The squirrel is extremely cute, and the movement animations are done very well, and the music and sound effects fit with the cutesy vibe going on. The backgrounds, however, are not varied, and although they do let you see the objects throughout the levels very well, they feel pretty bland. For instance, in the treehouse world, the background is yellow with slight shaded in areas resembling branches, in the helicopter world, this changes to a pink background, and as you move on, the background color changes, but nothing else does. I don’t know how much the backgrounds were played around with, but seeing backgrounds that really match the worlds you are playing in could help liven up the game quite a bit, for instance, having an actual forest or tree background for the treehouse world, and the sky with some clouds for the helicopter world.

Spin The Nut is supported by GameCenter, and has 4 different leaderboards, one for each world, which helps add to the drive of getting as good of a score as you can in each level, but there are no achievements, and in a puzzle game like this, achievements go a long way. However, it is a pretty unique puzzle game with nice graphics, and great physics. The objects and gaming mechanics given to us are great, especially with the game only being $0.99. Spin The Nut is definitely a puzzle game that I will play through all the way, and will most likely go back through trying to get better scores and move up in the leaderboards. P-O-M Apps has shown that they have what it takes to make a nice puzzle game with great physics, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they add with future worlds, and what they have in store for us with their next game.

Spin The Nut is getting a score of 7.5 out of 10

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spin-the-nut/id447830290?mt=8

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.

Space Touch gets a score of 9 out of 10.

Link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/space-touch-the-touch-shooter/id449855262?mt=8