Search Results for: label/3.99

Sci-Fi Sim Adventure. The genre’s completely new to me, but I don’t think I could have picked a better game to introduce me to the genre than DigitalFrog’s Space Frontier. Starting off, it has a great interactive tutorial that’s very easy to understand and shows you exactly what you need to know in order to make it through the game. During the tutorial, you’ll notice how much work has obviously gone into creating a great looking universe to play in, with loads of details, great object and item designs, and a fantastic atmosphere.

So, the whole object of the game is to build houses and make money, out in space. There will be some competition, especially from a character named Felipe, and his android, Doomsday, both with egos larger than the solar system you’ll be competing in. There are a bunch of little things you’ll need to keep your eyes on while you’re in the process of trying to build and make money. The sector that you’re building on will have a safety meter, which slowly decreases as you progress through each level, you’ll need to spend money to constantly keep this meter as high as you can so that your sector is not hit my an asteroid, which could destroy or damage buildings. Also, building your different types of houses requires you to spend minerals, which you will need to buy to replenish, as well as requires you to have enough robots to build them. This means that if you have 4 robots, you can only build a couple houses at a time, sometimes only one building at a time, depending on how many robots it takes to build that specific object.

Now, I know this technical stuff sounds kind of boring, but if you’re into simulation games, I think you know where all of this is going. There are 40 missions, or stages, that you’ll need to complete in order to beat Felipe. Each mission gives you certain tasks which you must complete in a given amount of time. You aren’t necessarily required to beat this time, but Felipe’s time is marked on the timer, and if you want to beat him, you will need to beat his mission times. As you progress though the game, you will unlock more and more buildings which will help you gather income, raise money, and fund the sectors. You are able to build, buy, sell, and destruct buildings, each of which has different attributes, different amounts of income, and effects your sector differently. Each time you start a mission, you are given a certain amount of cash in the bank, a certain amount of robots, and a certain amount of minerals, once the minerals and original bank money is depleted, you will be required to refill these on your own.

It might take multiple tries to beat each of Felipe’s times, but once you get the hang of everything, and multitasking, constantly keeping your eyes on the sectors safety, income, bank, minerals, and task progression. One thing I would absolutely love to see added in the future would be GameCenter. DigitalFrog has provided an in-game leaderboard that connects to their servers, which does help with the cheaters on GameCenter, but it takes away from competing against your GameCenter friends. Thankfully, there are in-game achievements. 54 to be exact. Some gamers love it when developers have their own leaderboards and achievement systems. I happen to be someone who happens to like when developers do this, but do understand why people want GameCenter integration. Still, it’s hard to say that no GameCenter is an issue when the developers do such a great job with their own in-game leaderboard and achievements like DigitalFrog has done here. You are awarded scores based on how quickly you complete the missions, and you can replay each mission, so making your way up the leader board, as well as competing against Felipe’s times does add quite a bit of replay value to the game. There’s also a Casual Mode that’s unlocked once you complete all of the regular campaign missions. For my first Sci-fi Simulation Adventure game, you can color me extremely impressed, and be sure that I’ll be searching the AppStore (and Steam) for more games in this genre. $3.99 is really a great price for the amount and quality of the content provided here with Space Frontier, and better yet, it‘s Universal! If you’re a fan of the genre, it’s one title you definitely need to check out, and if you’ve never heard of the genre, Space Frontier is probably one of the best, if not the best, game that you could first get, as you’ll end up being hooked from the moment you complete the tutorial levels.

The Tilt To Live and Shmup genres have been mashed together a few times, and have had extremely nice results. FlipShip and Blue Attack come to mind right off the bat. Though it’s no surprise really, as the whole Tilt To Live genre is basically bullet hell without any bullets, dodging and weaving through enemies like you would a bullet onslaught in a Cave title. True Axis (Jet Car Stunts) is the most recent publisher to see the potential with this genre, as they’ve released PomPom’s title, Space Tripper, their highly anticipated iOS port of the PSN and PC game, Astro Tripper.

In Space Tripper, you’ll shoot and dodge your way through 14 levels, split up across 4 different worlds, of wave-enemy battles, with quite a few boss fights, and even a task or two to mix things up, all building up to a final boss battle that could very well cause your heart to explode from adrenaline. One of the first things you might notice about Space Tripper, if you’ve never played it before, is that it is set up more like a shooter than a Tilt To Live type game, making it more reminiscent of Blue Attack than FlipShip or any other TTL genre’d title. However, if you go into the game thinking it’s going to play like your typical shooter, you’ll be in for quite a surprise, and maybe even disappointment.

You will need to be careful with how you handle all of the enemies though, as you won’t always have enough time to play cat and mouse with them, because all of the levels have a time limit. This adds to the already fairly high difficulty, and to the adrenaline you’ll pump out while playing Space Tripper. You’re given 3 lives in the beginning, and if you waste those, you’ll have an option to reset your score for one life. Don’t be fooled, even veteran Tilt To Live and Shmup players will have a fairly hard time with the game on Normal difficulty. The game is incredibly fun however, which will give you that ‘one more time’ thought over and over again, until you’ve wasted an hour of your life hammering away at a couple levels. The game is saved once you beat a world though, so you can come back and start a world with the lives that you had when starting that world, even after a game over, and once you finally do beat the game, you can try out the Hard and Very Hard difficulty settings, as well as the Score Attack and Challenge Modes that all provide an insane amount of replay value. On top of that, there’s OpenFeint and GameCenter integration, containing 21 different leader boards, one for each level in Score Attack Mode, one for each difficulty of the Campaign, and one for each of the 4 endless Challenge Levels. Not to mention the 8, incredibly hard to achieve, achievements.

Gamers have been waiting for this iOS port of Astro Tripper for quite some time, and even if you’ve got Astro Tripper, the gameplay in Space Tripper is different enough with the tilt controls that it’s basically a new gameplay experience. You’ll need to change your strategy, as tactics that are memorized, and fairly easy to pull off with a controller, are not to easy to pull off on a device utilizing tilt controls. $3.99 for this Universal game is a great deal, and one that any arcade, old-school, shmup, Tilt To Live, or adrenaline fanatic should jump on immediately. PomPom has definitely shown that they are the equivalent of Cave Inc. within the Tilt To Live genre.

Space Tripper gets a perfect score of 5 out of 5.

The App Store has dozens of tennis related games, but I’ve yet to find that one tennis game that gives me a console feel experience. Well look no further Flick Tennis: College Wars HD [$3.99(iPad Only)] by Rolocule is the best tennis game I believe for the iPad. I’m no tennis buff, but I’ve played many tennis games on multiple consoles and iOS devices and this has to be the closest you’ll get to a tennis console experience on an iOS device to date.  This game utilizes the iPad’s big screen magnificently. The game combines tennis and a comic book adventure together. You get to play the role as a tennis prodigy who has to fight for his survival and become the best college tennis player. Throughout the 11 episodes, the story starts to evolve more. Once you begin an episode the comic book story appears. After reading it you’re led into a match against an opponent who you must beat to complete the episode. The opponents get more difficult as you progress throughout each episode. Your opponents level type varies between beginner, amateur, and

professional. They also have certain types that they’re better at. The different player types range from Defensive Baseliner, Aggressive Baseliner, Volleyer, and All Court Player. By now your probably wondering how the controls work in the game. Well the only control you need is your finger. All you have to do is swipe your finger to guide the ball. Different gestures can change how you hit the ball. For a basic ground stroke you use 1 finger to swipe up. To perform a slice you use 2 fingers and swipe up. Doing a drop hit all you have to do is swipe down with 1 finger. The last way to hit the ball is performing a lob by swiping down with two fingers. You can also move your player by tapping on the area of the screen that you want him to move to. If your not in the mood to play through the episodes then you can always create an exhibition match. You can customize the match type, how many sets, opponent difficulty, etc. At any time you can save any of your matches to come back to and play later. If you have a friend over you can start a head to head multiplayer match. This allows two

people to play the game at the same time (see image to the left). The bad part about it is no online multiplayer. So if you’re by yourself you’ll have to stick to creating an exhibition match. That’s the only downer to the game. Hopefully GameCenter support will come with online multiplayer to go with it. One last thing, there’s also a $1.99 in-app purchase to unlock all the episodes in the game at once. It’s not required, but if you’d like to unlock all the episodes without beating them one by one you can do so. With all that said this was definitely one of the best tennis experiences that I’ve ever had on an iDevice. Overall the game has stunning visuals and is definitely worth every penny. My final rating is 5 out of 5 stars. If you have an iPad then this game is worth a look at. You can download Flick Tennis: College Wars HD [$3.99] for iPad here.