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New Trailer for iPad Exclusive Mailmen

Ayopa Games, publisher of the hit word game, W.E.L.D.E.R., the kids game, Chicken Rescue, and the newly released BigBot Smash, have just released a new trailer for the iPad exclusive, Mailmen, coming to the AppStore in February of 2012. Mailmen, developed by Sandstorm Interactive (Blood & Honor and Steampunk Underwater Battles [S.U.B.]), is a stealthy puzzle game set in a cartoony world that’s heavily inspired by The Simpsons. Here’s the description we got from Ayopa;

“A mailman’s task is meant to be simple – pick up and deliver the mail, then return to base. In the leafy suburbs of Greenville though, that seemingly simple job is tougher than expected. Greenville has a seemingly endless array of pesky guard dogs, mind-bending puzzles and ingenious villains trying to stop heroic mailmen Johnny, Charlie, and Dave from completing their objectives. They’ll need to use strategy, teamwork and unique special abilities to stay safe from the subjects of numerous “Beware of the Dog” signs. There must be an evil mastermind behind all of these nefarious obstacles – but who could that be? …“
Judging from the trailer and the little bit of info we’ve received, it looks like it could turn out to be one hell of a game. iPad gamers, be sure and keep your eyes and ears open for more news about Mailmen as February crawls closer and closer. It looks like this could be Ayopa’s next huge hit.
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December 1, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Inertia: Escape Velocity – 1.99 (Red Fly Studio)

Anti-gravity platformer games are really un-explored territory when it comes to iOS games. Actually, I can’t really think of one title that has taken complete advantage of gravity mechanics. Until now. Inertia: Escape Velocity, developed by Red Fly Studio, could very well be the first iOS platformer game to seriously manipulate gravity, using the mechanics as the core of the game, and they pull it off perfectly. I guess it should be brought up that Red Fly Studio has built Inertia: Escape Velocity expanding on award-winning gameplay that won Best Non-Professional Game, Achievement in Gameplay, Technical Achievement, and Gamers’ Choice Awards at DICE’s Indie Game Challenge this year (2011).

You’ll guide a robot who has crash landed on a distant planet through 35 levels, collecting items that you can use to put your ship back together. The fun part? You can manipulate gravity, and use a ton of interesting objects to get you through hazards and around difficult corners of the levels.
Now, we’ll get to the physics in a second, let’s go ahead and get everything else out of the way first. Graphics; The graphics in Inertia are top notch. On retina display, the game looks absolutely beautiful. The character model is done perfectly, and the animations for movement, jumping, even landing, and landing after moving in the air fairly quickly, which is an awesome looking animation, with the robot skidding on the ground in a great pose, are all perfect. The backgrounds you’ll be playing against are eerie, and immensely add to the great atmosphere of the game. As for the foregrounds that you’ll be running around on, they are put together in incredible ways. The actual level designs, and paths that you’ll need to take in order to progress through the game are, to say the least, very well thought out, but the actual objects used to put these levels together are fantastic. Utilizing rocks, and what looks like the landscape around the planet, every piece of the level, every platform, and wire hanging down fits perfectly together, and adds to the aesthetic feel of the whole game. In short; The whole graphical design and layout of the levels, backgrounds, environments, objects, items, everything within the game, is sheer genius.
The one bad thing about it all? On an iPod screen, your character is a little under a centimeter. The game does automatically zoom in for some sections, but not often. This does allow for large portions of the levels to be shown to the player, but can take a little getting use to, and really, you might never get use to it. The game feels like it’s not meant to be played on the small screen, and will most likely have you wishing you owned an iPad, or that your iPod could hook up to your TV for video.
Now to the core of the game; physics and controls. Control-wise, you’re given the standard platformer layout of left and right buttons, along with a jump and secondary use button. This secondary use button brings us to the physics, and is your inertia button. Pushing it creates a small gravity field around your character, allowing him to use his momentum to keep moving in whatever direction he’s going until you let go of the inertia button, or he hits an object, sending him in another direction depending on what way the object is facing. If you can’t already imagine, a development team that uses these controls and core mechanics to their full advantage would be able to come up with some extremely interesting situations for gamers to play through, and Red Fly Studio just so happens to be a development team that has done this. Throughout the levels, you’ll be able to interact with walls that slow you down, speed you up, or make you stick to them, while using the inertia button. There’s also gravity fields that push or pull you towards them, fan-like objects that throw you in the direction they’re facing, walls that you’ll need to be going a certain speed to break through, areas that look like moving particles that are generally used on the floors and ceilings, pushing you up and down, angled platforms, and electric fields that you’ll need to avoid all mixed in with these interactive objects.
Inertia: Escape Velocity is, to say the least, a huge game. The 35 levels all have 3 badges for you to earn, one for completion, one for picking up all of the bolts in the level, and another for finishing the level in a certain amount of time. Getting each one of these will require multiple playthroughs. Once you beat all 35 of the original stages, if you want more, you can purchase another 24 levels, each called the Inferno levels, which are the original levels, but set up like challenge levels, with increased difficulty, and different objects to use, more hazards, and a certain amount of big red bolts to collect so that you can open up the Mastery Levels, which are 5 of the hardest levels in the game, each also having the 3 badges to try and snag, all for $0.99. The original game is $1.99, so for all of the levels it’ll be $2.99. But if you decide not to buy the extra levels, the original 35+ levels will give you quite a bit of gameplay, taking about 4 hours to complete, not counting all the hours you can sink into them going back trying to grab all of the items and beating the level times. For the price, Inertia: Escape Velocity is an amazing game, and a definite must buy. It’s very quickly moved up to the #4 spot on my top 5 games of the year, making it incredibly easy to recommend to any and all platform and puzzle lovers.

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December 1, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

BigBot Smash – 0.99 (Ayopa Games/Andrew Wang)

Full on destruction games are kind of a niche genre within the AppStore, there’s really only a couple of titles that I can think of using destruction as a core mechanic, Destructopus, Robot Rampage, and to a lesser extent, Blast Zone Mega, and Burn The City, which is really more in the line of an Angry Birds type physics puzzler, but you get the idea. It’s not a genre that’s been well expanded on. Andrew Wang, and Ayopa Games (W.E.L.D.E.R., Chicken Rescue) are giving us one more title to add to that very short list. Inspired by the classic arcade game, Rampage, and taking influences from The Simpsons and Futurama, as well as trying to incorporate the customization of Mechwarrior, BigBot Smash is now available for our iDevices, and fingertips that are hungry for destruction.

To start it off, the controls in BigBot Smash will take quite a bit of getting use to, but once you do, even more problems show their face. There are two different control schemes included in the game. The first control method uses the iDevice’s accelerometer, tilting to turn the world that you’ll be destroying. This can be extremely difficult to use, as you’ll need to turn your device completely around to turn your robot around, and tilt it in pretty uncomfortable ways to turn. Tapping on the screen controls your robots projectiles, and tapping on the robot will make it jump. If you tap on a building that is close to the robot, it will smash it with it’s fists. Here’s where it gets even more difficult. If the building is just a little bit too far away, you’ll shoot at it instead of smashing it, which takes up quite a bit of time, which can be pretty frustrating in the Speedrun Mode, but outside of the Speedrun Mode, it’s just bothersome. Tapping on your robot also does not always make it jump, sometimes it will jump, and other times it will destroy the building right in front of it. There are touch controls as well, which have the same sort of issues as the tilt controls, except you won’t be tilting your device in uncomfortable ways, instead, you’ll be dragging your finger on the screen to change the robot’s direction. However, this also has it’s own issues, as more than half of the time, dragging your finger across the screen is registered as a tap, and will result in the robot shooting it’s projectiles. It’s not so bad that you won’t be able to play the game, but once you hit stage 4 in the campaign mode, and the game gets a little more hectic, you’ll be constantly wanting to turn the game off out of frustration. The same goes for the speed demolition and survival challenge modes, once the game reaches that point where the action picks up, the controls become a real issue.
The graphics are decent enough, and the draw distance is great, especially considering how many objects are on the screen at one time. Even after you destroy a couple buildings, and the debris is laying all over the ground, the draw distance hardly suffers at all, which is very surprising.
If you can look past these, especially the control issues, which could be fixed in an update, BigBot Smash does have quite a bit of fun gameplay at it’s core. Using three different robots, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, you’ll smash buildings, blow up buses, police cars, squish people by walking on them or jumping onto them, and shoot them with your lasers, which will give you a nice little laugh when the sound effects for this go off, and you can hear the people scream when they die. In the campaign mode, you’ll need to destroy buildings, looking for pieces of your robot girlfriend. Within most of the buildings are parts that you can use to upgrade parts on your robot, along with some power-ups, and recharging items. In the speed demolition, you’ll need to destroy a set amount of buildings before the clock runs out, and in survival mode, you guessed it, you stay alive as long as you can. Both of these extra modes will have you collecting bits and pieces to upgrade your robots as well, but are not saved or transferred over to the campaign robot, so you’ll start from scratch every time you start to play in these modes.
For $0.99, it’s not a bad game by any means. The controls can be worked with, and might actually just have so many issues if you’re playing on a small screen. Gameplay videos on the iPad show the game in a completely different light, and since the game is Universal, you won’t need to buy an HD version to find out. There are GameCenter leader boards, though only for Survival and Speed modes, but do have 48 achievements to try and grab. There is quite a bit of replay value, and the core gameplay looks like it could be great fun. But until an update hits with some tighter controls, it’s hard to really give the game a fair play on my small screen, but I’m excited about having the opportunity to.

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December 1, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Interview with Lab Rats Studio

Recently I managed to get in touch with Rion Holland over at Lab Rats Studio, the development team behind upcoming Third-Person Shooter M.U.S.E. This game is shaping up to be a down-right awesome shooter and brings back memories of arcade-style multiplier mayhem. Look for preview screens after the break.




– Can you give us some basic background about Lab Rats Studio? When did you guys form the team and what motivated you to enter the development scene?

Lab Rats Studio was formed a little over a year ago by four Wake Technical Community College students with a passion for game development. We all knew finding jobs at game studios in today’s economy would be very difficult with no experience, so we decided to do it ourselves. Lab Rats Studio was one of the inaugural companies to complete Joystick Labs’ three month game development business accelerator program in Durham, North Carolina. We all had a drive to work on our own game and have creative control over the process, which is what led us to create Lab Rats Studio. We realized that the mobile market was growing and there was not a lot of heavy competition for a game like M.U.S.E. yet.


– How did you come up with the ideas behind M.U.S.E.? Have you drawn inspiration from any other games?

As a lot of other games do, we of course drew inspiration from other games that we enjoy. We knew we wanted to create a third person shooter that was visually impressive and consisted of “console-like” shooter gameplay. We sometimes describe M.U.S.E. as a sort of Sci-Fi Max Payne set in a dark alternate present day. Others have noted inspirations from games like Duke Nukem and Gears of War. We then added on top of the shooting a layer of arcade scoring and combo systems that gives the game a competitive aspect to compete with friends to get high scores where players can post high scores to leaderboards via GameCenter or OpenFeint. We, of course, feel like M.U.S.E. is totally different than any other game out there, especially on the mobile market.


– What sort of struggles have you guys faced during the development of M.U.S.E. so far? How have you managed to overcome them?

Our biggest struggle has been that this is our first marketable game as a new game studio, so it has been a learning experience for all of us. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend in pre-production, which is a crucial stage of the game development process, that made us come up with concepts and designs within the production cycle. We also had a pretty large vision for what we wanted M.U.S.E. to be which had to be managed to make it work for mobile devices.  As an independent game development studio, we struggled a lot with money and keeping a staff of up to nearly 10 people. All of the people on our development team are extremely talented and dedicated individuals that have continued to work their butts off for the past year to make this game happen. We have managed to create this game on a shoestring budget and are very proud of what we have accomplished.

– What do you guys hope to bring to the App Store with M.U.S.E.? How will this push the iOS gaming platform further into the future?

We are bringing fun and immersive gameplay to the shooter genre on mobile devices. We took a play style that is popular on consoles and made it work for mobile devices so that people looking for a slightly more traditional “shooter” gameplay experience will feel at home in M.U.S.E. The controls have been through much testing and iteration to bring an intuitive and comfortable feeling as similar to a controller layout as possible. As briefly mentioned before, we added an arcade style scoring system and RPG inspired upgrade system to give the game some competition and replayability. Players will also be able to purchase currency via IAP for faster upgrades, or can play through the game and gain currency upon beating levels based off their scores. We are also very happy with the level of detail and quality of artwork we were able to accomplish on mobile devices that will only continue to get better as both we and the hardware continue to develop in the future.

– M.U.S.E. is looking really awesome. Can you tell us about some of the key features that we will see in the game?

M.U.S.E. will feature:

  • – Gorgeous visuals that showcase the full power of the iPhone4S and iPad 2 and rival console games for graphical richness and detail.
  • – Arcade-style scoring system that awards players points for combo kills and massive destruction.
  • – Compete against and challenge friends for the highest scores in Game Center (iOS) and Open Feint (Android)  leaderboards.
  • -“Adrenaline Mode” that is both a beginner’s lifeline and an elite player’s high scoring tool.
  • – Equip a variety of high-tech weapons as you fight against an army of cybernetic enemies.
  • – Upgrade your character as you play with over 80 individual upgrades for Sid and his weapons.
  • – Destructible environments rigged for maximum destruction and pyrotechnic mayhem.
  • – Immersive single-player campaign with a storyline told through comic book-style cutscenes.
  • – Full support for iOS 5’s AirPlay mirroring so you can watch your explosive firefights on your big-screen HDTV.
  • – iCloud saving so you can play on one device and pick up where you left off on another.
– You’ve mentioned an “Adrenaline” Mode. Can you expand on that feature?

“Adrenaline Mode” is a feature we have added to M.U.S.E. that is similar to a “rage” mode in other games where Sid literally shoots himself in the leg with a shot of adrenaline and goes into a state of heightened awareness and power. First off, adrenaline is gained by dispatching enemies or destroying environment objects in game. When your adrenaline meter is full and begins to flash, you can enter adrenaline mode which will slowly regenerate the player’s health, puts an outline on enemies and destructible objects to make them easier to see, bursts the player into slow motion after kills and destruction so they can plan their next move, and puts a bloom effect on screen. While in adrenaline mode, you can extend the timer by continuing to kill enemies and destroy objects, and the longer you do so, the more your adrenaline multiplier increases (the 0.0x in the top right). Every kill in adrenaline mode is multiplied by this value, so kills 60 seconds into adrenaline mode will yield 6x the normal score value, and then multiplied again by whatever your current chain value is.

To put it simply, each enemy and destructible has a base score value that is multiplied by the value of the combo chain, and then again by the adrenaline multiplier if you’re in it. So if you kill a Vorg Zed Ultra (base score 700) with a 3x combo chain when the adrenaline multiplier is at 2.5x, you’ll net 5250 points. Adrenaline mode is both an emergency lifeline for those that are about to die and need that extra boost, and a high-scoring method for the elite player that is trying to top their friends’ high scores.

– When do you hope to release M.U.S.E.? Have you discussed a price point?

M.U.S.E. is planned for release in December 2011 just in time for the Holidays. We plan to price the game within the same realm of our competition.


– What does Lab Rats Studio have planned for the future?

We plan to put out a content update for M.U.S.E.: Episode 1 about a month after launch that will include two more levels and a final boss fight level to complete the episode. There will be some added enemy variations and possible new upgrades and weapons to use. After that, we plan to continue the game through three episodic installments to complete the franchise. We are striving to be a premiere cutting edge game development studio on the mobile market.


We really appreciate Rion and Lab Rats Studio taking the time to chat with us about M.U.S.E. To learn more about M.U.S.E. and the studio, check www.labratsstudio.com and follow them on Facebook and Twitter!
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November 30, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Gua-Le-Ni- $4.99 (Double Jungle S.a.s.)

Get ready iPad owners for tons of puzzling fun in Gua-Le-Ni, or: The Horrendous Parade. This new iPad puzzle game comes from Stefano Gualeni and Double Jump. You’ll be able to get your hands on it very soon with it’s release date for November 28, 2011 (NOW AVAILABLE! CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD IT). The main objective in this game is to categorize beasts who are combinations of different types of animals. It’s actually a very intriguing game. The beast walks across the screen, one at a time. The only way to successfully categorize the beast is to use the cubes at the bottom of the screen before the beast walks to the other side of the screen out of view. Let’s say your beast is a mixture of a rhino and a condor (the rhino body part is first and the condor body part is second). This means that you’ll have to arrange the cubes to read rhi-dor. You can spin the cube around with one finger. If you have the cubes in the wrong order or if it’s upside down, then you can use two fingers to lift or rotate the cube. You can also add more cubes (which means more of the beast) for an even greater challenge. As you progress, food becomes a factor. If a beast is hungry then it’ll move faster. This is where you have to feed it a certain item for it to slow down. This is a really interesting game. It’ll certainly have your brain thinking (which is always a good thing). If you’re a little confused about the game then you can view the trailer directly below.

My overall rating for this game is 4.5 out of 5 stars. The interface in this game is very well-done, the visuals are nice, and rotating/spinning the cubes is extremely responsive. My only thing is that starting up the game is a little slow, since the game sort of acts like a book. Remember that this is an iPad only app and it’ll be available November 28th. You can pick it up for $4.99.

NOW AVAILABLE FOR $4.99

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November 28, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

OrangePixel’s Retro-Goodness $0.99 Sale!

Meganoid, OrangePixel’s first iOS release, could also be their best. 90 levels, all playable with 3 characters; The Hero, Sarge and Oreah. With The Hero, you’ll learn the levels, going through them, collecting all the gems you can find, and making it to the exit before time runs out. There’s also quite a bit of exploration involved, as a lot of the gems are hidden behind secret passages in walls. With the Sarge, it’s the same levels, but with a bumped up difficulty. These are typically for the hardcore platformer gamer. Then Oreah; with her, you’ll go through all of the levels in reverse. Some have been re-designed to make sure that there’s no spots where you can get stuck (ie; a big drop in regular mode will have an elevator platform in Oreah mode), and you’ll do all of these reversed levels, that’s right, in Sarge’s difficulty. Easily considered a steal for $0.99.
Stardash is OrangePixel’s second platformer to hit the AppStore. In it, you’ll guide your character through a Mario Land (GameBoy) type world. Stardash revolves more around speed-running, and requires you to find the quickest route from beginning to end, ala 1-Bit Ninja, by finding hidden paths that will get you there quicker. There are also hidden items that, if collected in each level, will unlock a hidden level in each of the 4 worlds. 40 levels makes it a bit smaller in size compared to Meganoid, but the challenge is still there, and should last gamers quite a while.
OrangePixel’s latest release, INC, is more a run’n’gun type platformer. You’ll go through 40 levels shooting your way through enemies, activating beacons to get through each level, while fighting bosses at the end of each of the 4 worlds, and finally saving Dr. Robotus. INC could be considered OrangePixel’s casual platformer, as the time requirements aren’t as strict, and the difficulty is no-where near as high as it is for Meganoid or Stardash. If you’re not a real platform gamer, INC should still give you quite a bit of entertainment.
Super Drill Panic, the one OrangePixel game that was originally released for free, and then shortly afterwards, was made into a paid game. The customers that downloaded the game while it was free got upgraded without any extra charge, having the ads removed. This, as you can imagine, showed how much OrangePixel respects their fans. In an AppStore full of developers taking money from gamers, and then “rewarding” them by making previously paid games free, and giving paying customers ads, OrangePixel set themselves apart with this move. You’ll play through 2 different campaigns, one male, making your way through caves, trying to not get squished by a huge boulder, and the other, playing as a female, who is trying to escape from buildings before jail-like bars come down on her. Both campaigns allow gamers to upgrade items and skills, as well as unlock an endless arcade level after completion. Super Drill Panic is by far the most casual game in OrangePixel’s line-up, appealing to hardcore gamers as well as people who got into gaming because of Angry Birds.

OrangePixel is definitely one of our favorite developers here at The App Shack, and having all 4 of these games, we can easily recommend each of them. They will all give you hours upon hours of gameplay, and at the sale price of $0.99 each, it’s impossible not to HIGHLY recommend each of these titles. Be sure to check em out if you haven’t already, and get ready to enjoy some awesome retro goodness that’ll bring back memories of old-school gaming.
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November 25, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Worms Party Review – 0.99


Worms. They are absolutely repulsive creatures used only to gross out people and to be placed in your parents spaghetti. But they seem to be used often as cute protagonists so I guess they have something going for them. 
In this new worm filled adventure you star as a worm with a rocket on its back. Unfortunately at the party you are sleeping at, three jokesters light the rocket on your back causing you to be brutally propelled out of the window and into the world. It is your job as the player to take control of the worms path and make sure he doesn’t hit any obstacles on his flight. This is accomplished by taping the upper or lower part of the screen. By tapping the bottom of the screen you dive into the ground and by tapping the upper part you jump to avoid obstacles.  Obstacles are placed in various different locations, requiring you to think fast to avoid making the wrong move. Some are embedded halfway in the ground allowing you to either jump or dive to avoid them while others take up all of the above ground area.  Unfortunately after you have played through a few games all of the obstacles become fairly easy to avoid and not even your ever-increasing high speed makes these any more deadly. Also no new obstacles are introduced later in your never ending run so you can get bored of them easily. Also scattered among the level are power-ups which can do one of three things. Either give your worm another life, a helmet, or let him destroy anything in his path. You lose life’s by running into obstacles so its always a good idea to pickup a health or a helmet  pick-up.
By completing certain pre-determined missions you can unlock new rocket types which don’t really do much other than look cool. If thats incentive enough for you to play hours and hours of this game then you really need to find something better to do with your time.  Another annoying feature of this game is its achievment system. They choose to use something called Kiip points. Apparently you can redeem these Kiip points for real world items from certain companies. This system miserably fails for this game as you can only use them for Kodak pictures and is a big nuisance when playing the game.

Overall this is a sub par endless runner which feels like a rip off of Tiny Wings and the original Worms franchise. I give it a 1/5.

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November 23, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

New Updates & A Developer Goes NUTZ-O

Yateland’s physics based puzzle game, Rejoin, has just been updated to include GameCenter, and has an all new scoring system! If you had the chance to read our review of this nice puzzler, you might remember that the lack of GameCenter, and lack of any scoring system were two big things we said would be great to have within the game, and here they are, adding quite a bit of replay value as well as added challenge to the game. Now’s a great time to get your hands on this interesting puzzle game.
iniGames latest shmup, Space Ship Ion, has just received it’s second update, getting one new level, along with a new boss! Definitely nice when shmups add new content, especially when it comes with a new boss.
Orange Pixel’s newest addition to the retro platformer genre, INC, has gone through it’s second update. This time, they’ve done more than bug fixing! Now, you can change the position of the virtual buttons. On the Touch Arcade thread, this was a pretty big deal for a lot of people, especially those playing the game on an iPad. The landscape rotation was also fixed, as well as moving the pause button to the top of the screen, and of course, some bug fixing with the touch input on the level select screens. For those of you who were waiting for some changeable controls, now would be the time to pick up this gem.
Bonpeach, the developer of the fantastic arcade game, Explodables, where you tap on rockets in a certain order to get bonus items and score HUGE points, has just updated this great game with an all new ENDLESS MODE, as well as adding a new Rainbow Frenzy, and streamlining the tutorial into the Endless Mode (which you can turn off in the options). Now the game is easier to understand, and more fun to play. Be sure to check out our Twitter page, in the near near future, for info on how you can snag an Explodables Promo Code!

HotGen’s two titles, Spacelings, and the ever so popular To-Fu: The Trials of Chi, recently had their Free Ad-filled versions pulled from the AppStore. You might be asking yourself why? Well if you’ve updated already, you know the answer, and chances are, you’re not too happy about it.
Spacelings and To-Fu, both paid versions, have been made FREE and have had ADs thrown into them. Not only were ads thrown into both paid versions of these games, but the developers decided to hide the fact by saying that the update was for “iOS5 computability fixes”, and gamers could not be more upset. After the update, their ratings for To-Fu dropped from 4 1/2 stars down to 2 1/2. The developers have also been deleting FaceBook posts asking them about the updates, as well as not responding to their paying customers e-mails, as well as dropping off the face of Touch Arcade, which they were very active on before essentially stealing money from their customers (that’s what they did, right? Offering a paid version next to a free ad filled version, then pulling the ad filled version, and putting the ads into the paid version, then making the paid version free. Gamers had the option to pick up the free version, but instead, they opted to pay for the game, and in return, got the free version. Unless we’re missing something here, that’s essentially stealing).
You can voice your opinion on their FaceBook page, but they’ll just delete it. So go ahead, give the games a 1 star rating in the AppStore, and delete the games on your device. They don’t run like they use to anyway, having constant crashes, skewed gameplay, and the games are now stretched out to make room for the HUGE ads on the bottom of the screen. Watch out for To-Fu 2 to be updated in the near future as well, and keep HotGen on your DO NOT BUY FROM list. They seem to have gone CRAZY stupid.
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November 23, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Dark Meadow goes on sale for 0.99!

Dark Meadow, by Phosphor Games Studio, has just gone on a limited time price drop from $5.99 down to $0.99! For those of you who don’t have this incredibly immersive game yet, now would be the time to pick it up. The developers have nailed the Infinity Blade type equip/upgrade system and gameplay, but thrown you into a creepy world filled with amazingly well created characters. There’s quite a bit of exploration, finding gold, and bits and pieces of the story laying around. It’s definitely worth picking up if you’ve got the space on your device. For a dollar, it’s almost impossible to regret purchasing this one.
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November 23, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Act of Fury: Kraine’s Revenge – 1.99 (Forge Reply/DarkWave Games)

Shoot-em-ups have expanded quite a bit since Cave hit the iOS scene in April of 2010. However, very few games have done what Cave’s releases have done for the scene, so it’s nice to see a developer realize this, and take the genre in completely different direction. DarkWave Game’s new title, Act of Fury: Kraine’s Revenge, is a different kind of shmup for fans of the genre. A game in which, instead of shooting your enemies down, you get as close to them as you can, disabling their systems, and taking them down with a tornado like force that surrounds you.

To start things off, the graphics in Act of Fury are great. I have run into some slight jumping around of the screen when the levels start to scroll left or right, or zoom in and out, like when an air-strike comes in, however it’s nothing game-breaking, but is noticeable, and should be brought up. Aside from this, the variety with enemies is nice, the 4 different environments look great, and the animations are fantastic. The music and sounds go along nicely in passing on the feel of the world in Act of Fury as well.
Gameplay-wise, you’re able to use two different controls schemes, both involving relative touch controls. One gives you a 2:1 movement ratio, while the other gives you a 1:1 ratio. Generally with shmup games, a 1:1 ratio is preferred, so it’s nice that DarkWave included it as an option, but the whole game plays and feels better with the 2:1 default movement. There’s 9 Stages, each with a Normal, and Hell difficulty mode. In the Normal Mode, you’re able to disable enemies projectiles by attacking them (moving next to them), while in Hell Mode, the enemies will keep firing at you no matter what. There are items that you can pick up by destroying buildings, extra lives, bombs, shields, and items that stop time, but if you don’t use an item that you’ve picked up before you pick up another one, it’s gone forever. A big part of the gameplay is waiting until there are multiple objects on the screen that you can destroy, and trying to destroy them all at once, building up your combo, and Fury bar, which is displayed under your health bar, and increases your damage radius, total damage, and increases your score quite a bit. Mastering how to build up your Fury gauge and destroy as many destructible objects at a time is the key to scoring big.
Each of the 9 stages offers 3 star ranks which are based solely on your score. Not at all on how many times you get hit, or how many lives you loose, which is fairly different from every other shoot-em-up game out there. You’re then able to use the stars that you earn to ’buy’ upgrades and power-ups in the shop. There are some more powerful upgrades that you can only use in Hell Mode, which helps drive players to play the Harder Difficulty after beating the Normal Mode. You are able to change how you allocate your stars for power-ups before each stage, so experimentation does come into play, which is a great addition to the core gameplay. I should mention that ,right now, there seems to be a problem with a couple of the stage’s rankings, but is being worked on by the developers and gamers, and a fix for the one or two levels with un-balanced score/star rankings should be available fairly soon.
Act of Fury is a very interesting addition to the shmup genre. It does a fantastic job of mixing the Spirit/Bit Pilot/Silverfish type mechanics with shmup influenced gameplay, and presenting it all in an extremely polished and well rounded package. There are GameCenter and OpenFeint leader boards for each of the 9 stages in both Normal and Hell Modes, as well as a total score leader board for both Modes, along with 32 achievements, all adding immensely to the replay value, which, once you get into the Hell Mode levels, is already fairly high. With the price being $2, it’s definitely a game that’s worth every penny, and then some, especially if you’re a fan of the shoot-em-up genre. Act of Fury also runs on 2nd GEN devices, which, with this genre, is fantastic news.
Act of Fury: Kraine’s Revenge gets a score of 4 out of 5.

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November 23, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >