Monthly Archive: December 2011

In order to do this, you’ll need to equip your robot box with the robots that you want to use for the stage. As you progress through the game, more robots are added to your arsenal. Once you have your set-up, and start the level, each of the robots are shown at the bottom of the screen. To select them, all you need to do is tap on them, and then tap on where you want them to go on the bed where Zach’s sleeping. While you do this, evil creatures will start spawning at the end of the bed, and will be making their way towards you. If you end up placing your robots on the edges of the bed, you might just miss the evil creatures walking in the middle, so it’s best to have them placed more towards the head of the bed, at least at first. With this lay-out, you risk not being able to defeat the creatures before they run into Zach’s head, taking away his “Z’s”. So in the beginning of the game, there is quite a bit of risk/reward, and strategy in where you place your robots. After a couple levels, you can start using the shop to upgrade your robots with the coins that are picked up as you defeat enemies in-game. Here, you can increase their attack, defense, speed, and more, making it easier to place them in various places around the bed, not needing to risk them passing you and running directly into Zach. The money you collect, as well as the upgrades you purchase also carry over to a new game, which is awesome. If the game becomes too difficult, starting over can drastically decrease the challenge depending on how upgraded your robots are. This comes in handy, especially when younger kids are playing.

On top of the Story Mode, there is also a Quick Play Mode, in which you’re able to play through each of the levels which you’ve already been to in the Story Mode, as well as a Survival Level for each of the 4 rooms that you’ll be playing in. This helps bring the replay value up significantly.

The graphics and animations in Wind Up Robots are incredibly well done. They create an atmosphere that totally immerses gamers in to the gameplay. Considering the monsters only come out at night, you will be playing in dark rooms throughout the game, but because of this, the robots bight colors, and the light given off by them while taking care of the creatures, really stands out in a fantastic way. It’s not so dark that you are unable to see the objects found throughout the rooms, which is great, because they really give you the feeling that this is a house with a young boy living in it. Really, the game’s graphics and animations remind me of Disney movies, Toy Story in particular. The music is also a great addition to the atmosphere of the game, bringing the entire gameplay experience around, full-circle, making it an incredibly smooth, polished, fun game to get yourself wrapped up in.

Like others in the genre, Funny Hell has you sending out various characters to battle the enemy. However, in Funny Hell, you’re given a mission or two at the beginning of each stage, which does set it slightly apart from other titles. The first 10 of 50 levels, that are split up across 5 different worlds, each leading you closer to the center of ’hell’, and each having an available 3 ‘skull‘ ranking, are set up like tutorial levels, adding another character to the line-up, and getting you acquainted with the enemies, and gameplay in general. Most of these levels are completed when you send out a certain number of characters, or kill a certain amount of enemies. After this, the gameplay picks up fairly quickly, with the first real stage’s mission having you survive for 3 minutes and 30 seconds, which, believe it or not, can prove to be quite the challenge, not often, but sometimes to a frustrating extent. There are more of these mission type levels as you progress throughout the game, having you save up a certain amount of coinage, or kill a certain amount of one type of enemy. It does add some extra strategy behind the already fairly strategic gameplay. Each of your characters has a certain ability, generally either shooting a projectile, or having a strong attack. There are some which both fire projectiles and melee attack, but cost more as well. You will need to go through some trial and error figuring out which enemies require which units to be sent out to ensure the most possible damage is done, but once you figure it out, deciding when on the battle field they should come into contact with each other also becomes part of the strategy. You’re able to build an offensive attacking stone type character on the side of your base, which tosses projectiles out, but only within a certain range. If you’re having trouble with some enemies, sometimes waiting for them to make it down towards your base so that you can also attack with that stone character is the best course of action. It makes for some challenging, and entertaining gameplay.

There is no upgrade store, which is kind of upsetting, but as you progress through the game,

Funny Hell is controlled like most other base defense titles, tapping on the units you want to send out, which are located at the bottom of the screen, and swiping anywhere else on the screen to scroll left and right. There are also coins which pop up randomly as you are battling, and they bounce along the ground, disappearing fairly quickly, and are picked up by tapping on them. This might become a problem for some gamers, because as the coins are bouncing, sometimes in the heat of the moment, you can wind up trying to tap on a coin, and end up tapping on a unit to be sent out since they are directly beneath the bouncing coins, and when it happens, it can be incredibly frustrating.

The graphics and animations are fantastic. Graphics-wise, the game is fairly cartoony, and very vibrant with loads of color. The character and enemy designs are done very well, and fit the extremely vibrant cartoon looking environments to a “T”. The animations for attacking, movement, falling objects, coins bouncing around, death, they’re all fantastic, really adding quite a bit to the entertainment. The BGM that’s included with the game brings it all together to create one hell of a great base defense game.

Starting up Crazy Bomber, there are two different gameplay types; Story Mode, and Battle Mode. Story Mode includes 60 levels spread across 3 different environments; Jungle, Graveyard, Glacier, and then each having a more difficult set of levels, so really, there’s 6 different worlds. Each stage has a 3 star ranking available, and is based on score. Getting 3 stars can be pretty challenging as well, most of the time requiring multiple play-thoughs. There are also 4 different characters you can choose to play with; Vampire, Zombie, Wizard, and Knight, none of which have any special abilities, and are only there for purely aesthetic purposes, but I will admit that it’s nice being able to pick between different characters.

Once you start playing, you’ll notice that it’s basically just like Bomberman, though it also expands on the gameplay. You’ll need to place bombs to destroy enemies and level objects, like trees, shrubs, and boxes. Blowing up these objects, trees, boxes, ect, will almost always provide extra bombs, though there are some speed power-ups and coins scattered throughout as well. At the beginning of each level, you are only able to place one bomb at a time, but as you collect bombs throughout the level, you’ll be able to place two, three, or more bombs at a time. As you collect bombs, the strength of each explosion will increase, making it easier to take out enemies across the screen. You are also able to link bombs together, placing one in the path of another’s explosion causes a domino like effect. As you progress through the game, you’ll come across crate moving puzzles, conveyor belts, and even boss fights at the end of each world.

The Battle Mode is unlockable as you progress through the game, but there is no indication as to what unlocks it. Whether it be how many stars you‘ve collected, or after completing world 3, it will unlock about half-way through the game. Battle Mode is a local ‘multiplayer’ type gameplay mode, putting you against upto 3 other AI opponents. It does add to the gameplay, but feels a bit hollow

There is a shop accessible from the level select screen, which lets you purchase health potions as well as remote detonated bombs, which you can buy with the coins earned in-game. There are no IAPs, which is always nice, so no worries about the game difficulty being geared towards getting more money out of you.

Controls in the game are simple, and work very well. A joystick for movement, a button for placement of a bomb, and health and timed bombs are available along the right side of the screen. The movement is tight and responsive, and bombs snap to position, so placing a bomb exactly where you want is very easy, even when moving around quickly.

The graphics in Crazy Bomber are very polished, with each of the levels having wonderful design. The character models and animations are impressive, as are the explosions of each of the different types of bombs. Movement is extremely smooth, with no lag or drops in frame-rate even with multiple explosions going off at once. It would be nice to see some attack animations for when you run into enemies, instead of just seeing your character flash a bit, but not having any attacking animations for the enemies isn‘t necessarily anything that takes away from the gameplay. The HUD is a little messy. The different types of bombs, as well as how many of them you have, how much gold you’ve got, the number of enemies killed out of how many are in the level, as well as how many trees are left to blow up, your score, the pause button, and a picture of your character above the health are all thrown in along the top of your screen. Being able to tell exactly how many bombs you have can sometimes be frustrating. Aside from this, the amount of detail in the levels, objects like trees, bushes, enemies, and everything else is very professionally done.

First off, the graphics in Arrow of Time are done fairly well, however, the animations are really clunky, and not very impressive. Most of the time, it looks like characters are sliding along the ground while running or walking, and it looks like multiple frames have been left out of most of the animations.

Control-wise, you’re able to move with a joystick, aim by swiping on the screen, shoot your weapon by tapping the fire button in the lower right corner. Here’s where it gets pretty uncomfortable. To jump, you’ll need to flick your device either to the left or to the right, and to do an avoidance roll, you need to flick your device forward, or towards yourself.

The collision detection is also something that needs to be worked on quite a bit, as it makes the game extremely frustrating, and almost unplayable. In the second level of the game, you’re required to jump up and grab onto a part of a wall, then pull yourself up. While grabbing onto the wall is done automatically, running up to the wall, and then quickly flicking your device to the left or right will make your character jump up and grab it. Here’s where the collision detection comes in. Half the time, the game will automatically move your character to the left or right, rotating them, having them holding on to air. Your character can get stuck like this, not being able to flick the device again to pull yourself up, or use the joystick or dodge flicks to make your character let go of the wall, forcing you to re-start the stage from the beginning. About 40% of the time, your character will go straight into the wall, getting stuck as well, with no way to get them out, again, forcing you to restart the level. There are some cases in which your character will go into the wall, but still be able to climb up with a left/right flick of your device, and some times the act is done the way it’s supposed to be done. In short, you’ll be able to pull this off about 1 out of 7 or so times, and with level 2 requiring you to do this three times, it’s almost impossible to make it through the stage. There are other sections where collision detection gets to be VERY frustrating, like in stage 1, when you’re supposed to protect a girl, but somehow the enemies swords are able to reach through you, and about 4 times the length of the sword to kill the woman, requiring you to start over. I think you get the point.

There are various cut-scenes throughout the game, which are not terribly voice-acted, but there is no option to skip, and no pause button, so you’ll need to set aside a certain amount of time when you have no chance of being bothered. Some of the cut-scenes give you information which you’ll need in order to progress through the game, so they can be fairly important.

After 3 and a half years, and a crazy amount of work, effort and dedication that very few of us will ever experience, PomPom and TrueAxis gave iOS gamers one of the most amazing titles to ever hit the AppStore. Ever. Space Tripper is an arena based shooter with 4 levels of difficulty across 14 levels. There’s also endless Score Attack and Challenge Modes, with each of the 14 levels available for the Score Attack Mode, and 4 different Challenges. After playing pretty much nothing but Space Tripper for weeks after getting it, it climbed the charts of my own personal favorites list, clawing and scratching it’s way to the top, eventually finding the #1 spot on my ‘Best of 2011’ list, and shortly after, winding up as my #1 favorite iOS game EVER.

If you haven’t checked out this amazing game yet, make sure you grab it, and tell everyone you know about it!! Help get this game the attention it rightfully deserves!

Alrighty, to start things off today, I got an e-mail from Justin, a developer of Wizard Ops, a 3rd person rail shooter, letting me know about their up-coming update, and it’s a fairly big one.

Version 1.2 will include one new level, “Deep Woods” in which you’ll search and destroy the deadly contraptions created by the factory, three, that’s right, THREE difficulty modes, with Easy being the original difficulty, being able to take 10 hits before you die, and having unlimited respawns. Medium difficulty; you can take 3 hits before you die, and you only get 5 respawns, and Hard difficulty; One shot kills you and you only get 3 respawns. So those of you who thought that Wizard Ops was a bit too easy, get ready to get your bullet dodging game on! There’s also going to be three new leaderboards for each level, split up between the three difficulties. The leaderboards that are already included in Version 1.1 will stay the same, but be renamed “Easy”. They have also included GameCenter Achievements, 10 of them, and have plans on adding more in the future.

They were also kind enough to send over a screenshot of the new level, lookin mighty nice if you ask me;

If you haven’t picked up Wizard Ops yet, we highly recommend that you do. This update is… well… FRIGGIN AWESOME! If you’d like to find out more about the game, you can head over to our review, and see just what the game has in store for you, or you can go head and check out the developer’s website, there’s quite a bit of info and content there, so even if you read our review, you might want to check out the site anyway.

The Version 1.2 update has already been submitted, and is waiting for approval from Apple. We’ll be posting when the update goes live, as usual, so check back, or keep an eye on your update notifications, because it should hit the store soon.

You can download Wizard Ops from the iTunes store by clicking here;

• 5 new levels• A free holiday skin for Chicken Mama• Crates have been replaced by presents• Snow has fallen and covered all the levels• Various level tweaks

• Platforms bug fix.• New Icon• Transparent Controles

*** iPad display bugs fixed• Universal support for iPad and all iOS devices!• Flip Screen option in the Settings menu!• The View Map panel in the pause menu how has indicators showing how many notes/books you’ve found in the current level, and whether all monsters have been cleared!• Spell changes! Silence has been merged into Time Circle to create a single all-powerful buffing spell, Sword Fury and the elemental summon spells have been improved, and the less useful Lucky and Shield spells have been removed from the random spell drops, though you can still obtain a Shield by collecting hearts or overflowing spells!• Several weapons have been given new, upgraded effects and updated description text. Make sure to check them out, some were completely changed.• Rabbit’s Foot now increases the hat drop rate by five times.• Ring of the Zealot now resurrects you, once, at half health with a Sword Fury buff applied to you.• Reviving after being defeated now grants a free spell.• Save file! You can export or import your save data (in save.dat) via iTunes File Sharing to copy your unlocked items and experience points to your other devices! This also allows backing up saves to your PC.• Many level tweaks! Additional urns added to most levels. Backtrack-blocking doors removed for most levels. Many overly long levels were shortened a bit and/or had more urns added. This should improve the pacing of Story Mode.• Various bugfixes, including some achievement bugs and dialog typos.

• SpaceShip directional operation• language localization: English

• New Christmas hats,• New game name

• RAVENMARK is now Universal and will run on the iPad natively!• RAVENMARK will now autosave at the start of every Command Phase, and at the start of every dialogue scene. The game will also autosave when you exit from a battle to the Main Menu. The Continue button in the Main Menu will continue the last autosaved game.• The speed of the splash animations (during combat) is now adjustable in the Options menu. The splash animations can also be turned off, such that only damage and buff/debuff effects will be denoted after each combat instance.UI Changes• When the terrain grid is visible, it will clearly indicate all tiles which the player’s own Elements have been commanded to occupy due to Move and Wheeling commands.• When an AI-controlled Formation is selected, a new toggle is now available to switch between either displaying their movement range or displaying their attack range; the attack range will show the maximum threshold for attacking without moving, as well as attacking after a move.Gameplay Changes• Players may now give an order to Move an Element or Formation into tiles either already occupied or blocked by their own units.Bug Fixes and Optimizations• Fixed an issue where the information panel for AI-controlled units would sometimes not display.• Fixed the radial menu scale not being updated properly when centering on a unit from a zoom that is larger than the default.• Fixed dialogue errors in the cutscenes for Ravenhood mission 5, and the bug where the characters were assigned incorrect dialogue at the end of Ravenhood mission 6.• In Ravenhood missions 4 and 5, certain buildings will no longer be erroneously drawn on top of units at certain locations.• More aggressively reduce memory usage and increase FPS across the game.

[Gamevil]

Action RPG

–=iPhone

[Ian MacLarty]

Casual Arcade

–=iPhone

[Telltale Inc]

Adventure

–=iPhone

[Mobigame]

Action Puzzle Platformer

–=Universal

[Level Eight AB]

Monster Truck Destruction

–=Universal

[Pixel and Texel]

Action RPG

–=iPhone

[Gameloft]

Sports-Tennis

–=iPhone

[Com2us]

Action RPG

–=Universal

Tap the Bomb is set-up like Fruit Ninja, except with TtB, you’ll need to avoid the fruit, and tap the bombs. Who woulda thunk it, huh? Bombs and fruits are tossed up, down, and in from the sides of the screen, and it’s up to you to destroy all of the bombs. There are great scoring opportunities, with bonuses for critical hits (perfect hits), multi-tapping (tapping on more than one bomb at a time), and chain combos (tapping on a bomb that explodes, hitting another bomb and making it explode as well). With your points, you’re able to buy upgrades from the shop, which, in turn, will help produce higher scores. There’s also achievements that, when completed, you can cash in for more points to spend in the shop.

In the shop, you’re able to increase the amount of points that you’re given for your bonuses, like how many points you’re given on top of your original multi-tap bonus, and so on. There’s also an upgrade for how often rockets fly by on the screen. These rockets cause huge explosions, and if tapped at just the right time, can set off a huge chain combo. The last item in the shop is a health pack, this allows for a one time use health booster, giving you back one of the 3 hearts you’ll start each game with. The prices for items in the shop are not outrageous by any means, and even more surprising; there are NO IAPs. So you won’t have to worry about being nickel and dimed to death just to get on to the GameCenter leaderboards. Speaking of that, there is one GC board, which displays your highest score, along with 11 achievements, all adding to the already high replay value of this high-score based arcade tapper.

Now, with Parogames first title, Parodise, the story was a fairly important aspect of the game, however, here with Tap the Bomb, it’s not so much. There is a ‘Dumpedia’ in the main menu, which gives you the plot of the game, telling you why you’re blowing up these different bombs, background on each of the different bombs, as well as the fruit, the special rocket, and info on some characters from their game, Parodise, and what roll they play in why you’re blowing up bombs. It is a very nice addition to the game, and to the whole original Parodise story, but having a cut-scenes or something like comic strip sequiences after you have a 1,000+ point game, or after maxing out certain upgrades, would have been an awesome addition. I was hoping for more story elements in Tap the Bomb after Parodise had a story for every day that you were there slashing objects, but the lack of it shouldn’t distract from how great this game is.

Also included in Parodise were plenty of different modes that you could unlock while progressing through the game. Sadly, in Tap the Bomb, there is only one mode. This does bring the replay value down a bit, but not too much. Hopefully more gameplay content will be added in future updates. Especially with similar games having 4 or 5 different gameplay modes, it’ll be hard to compete with them, even with the inclusion of a story and ‘Dumpedia’.

Digitalfrog’s sci-fi simulation adventure game, Space Frontier is dropping in price tomorrow from $3.99 down to $0.99! This Universal space sim is one of the best, if not the best sci-fi simulation title available in the AppStore. Top-notch graphics, animations, music, sounds, controls, and gameplay all come together perfectly to create an experience great for new comers as well as hardcore fans of the genre.

*Countless tasks and objectives to complete to keep your colonies going strong