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Number of Results: 13

Radballs – 2.99 (Glow Play)

Radballs is a new block matching puzzle game from Glow Play. In it, you’ll need to match up Radballs in groups of 4 or more, making a Mega-Radball. When the Beat Wave, a bar that moves down the screen in time with the beat, hits your Mega-Radball, you’ll need to tap on it, and swipe up and down “scratching” the bar against the Mega-Radball, building up energy, until it’s glowing brightly, then release, and build the Radness Meter at the top of the screen. Filling up your Radness Meter is how you beat the level, and progress through the game.

Radballs controls like most match 3 games, needing to swipe orbs with one another in order to make groups of them. Here, you don’t need to make a match in order to move the orbs, so you’re able to move one orb across the screen to make a match. Once you’ve created a Mega-Radball, you can keep adding to it by putting more orbs on the ends or sides of it, so long as you have enough like orbs there. For instance, if you have a Mega-Radball that’s 3×3 orbs big, you’ll need 3 orbs on top to extend it, or 3 orbs on the side to extend it and make it 4×3 orbs big. The larger the Mega-Radball, the more Radness will be added to your meter. Also effecting Radness is the brightness of the Mega-Radball while you’re scratching the Beat Wave over it. If the Beat Wave just moves over the Mega-Radball without you scratching it, you’re given very few Radness points, hardly filling up the meter at all.
The graphics are done in a very vibrant, 80’s/early 90’s type style that always makes me think of the Saved By The Bell show opening. Everything is very smooth and stylish, and gives the game a real retro feeling while staying modern. The animations are very well done, and the menus look great too. The music in Radballs is pretty nice electronica that’s not too cheesy, not too harsh, and really does play quite a big roll in the game with the Beat Wave bar moving to the beat, and when scratching with the bar, the music moves forward and backward depending on how you let go of it. You’re also able to use your own music to play the game, so if the in-game music isn’t really to your liking, you can still enjoy the game quite a bit. However, the Beat Wave bar will not always move to the beat with your personal music, but it‘s not so far off that it‘s distracting, which is a plus. Music also changes filter frequency when pausing the game, which is a nice little addition, and yet another attention to small detail that the developers have thrown into the game.
The gameplay itself is split up across 3 different game modes, Arcade, Survival, and Time Trial, with 8 different levels to play, each with a different theme, and 4 difficulties, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Insane. While moving radballs around, and trying to make Mega-Radballs as big as you can, there are power-ups that you’ll encounter; Bomb, Zapper, and Freeze. Each of which you’ll need to put your finger over, and hold it there while it starts to glow, and pulse, then let go when the glow is at it’s brightest. The Bomb will clear out a pretty large section of radballs, while with the Zapper, you drag your finger around the screen while a bolt of electricity pops radballs, and the Freeze power-up freezes the Beat Wave and stops radballs from falling, but you’ll need to wipe the screen clear of the frost that covers the entire screen before you can move radballs around again. The Bomb and Zapper result in pretty large Radness Meter jumps, while Freeze helps you create large Mega-Radballs that will give you big Radness point in return.
In Arcade Mode, you’ll need to fill your Radness Meter in order to move on through 8 waves in each level. If you fail to continuously build up your Radness Meter, it will drain, and if it empties, you’ll need to replay that wave. Survival Mode lets you play the same way as Arcade Mode, but lets you play through unlimited waves until you fail. Time Trial requires you to fill up your Radness Meter before 60 seconds is up, seeing how fast you can fill the meter all the way. You will also run into Radness Multipliers. These happen when you make a Mega-Radball, bust it with your Beat Wave, and the cascading radballs end up making another Mega-Radball. It will automatically explode, giving you 2x, 3x, even 4x the radness points.
Glow Play has done an extremely good job at mixing the block matching genre with the music/DJ genre, and this mesh works exceedingly well. Giving players the option to play with their own tracks, having Survival and Time Trial Modes, 4 difficulties, GameCenter support with 3 leader boards, and 40 achievements gives Radballs an endless amount of replayabilty. The graphics are awesome, there’s tons of action, and everything about the game is extremely polished and professional, while screaming fun at every turn. $2.99 for this Universal game is a great price. You’re also given the option to listen to the music tracks in-game if you enjoy the music, and having the soundtrack available to just listen to is something I personally think all music games should do. This is one game that will not leave my device in the near future.
Radballs is getting a score of 9.5 out of 10.
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September 10, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Riot Rings – 0.99 (Cervo Media)

Riot Rings is a new Zuma-type bubble popper from Cervo Media GMBH. In it, you’ll match up groups of 3 or more different animal bubbles to clear out multiple rings thought over 100 levels and 3 different gameplay modes. Right off the bat, I want to say that Riot Rings is now my favorite Zuma type game, knocking The Temple Zumas out of the #1 spot. Cervo Media has taken the bubble popper game, and expanded it in a pretty original way. Instead of trying to clear out the bubbles before they get to the end point, you try and clear out the bubbles before the key on one end, and lock on the other end of the ring touch each other. To make it even more interesting, animals are flung into the rack from the outsides of the screen along with the animals that you fling into the rack from the middle of the screen.

The controls are pretty much like every other Zuma-type game out there, where you touch where you want your bubble to go. And like all other Zuma-type games out there, this is easier said that done. There’s various twists and turns in the rings that give you some pretty awkward angles to shoot at.
Also, sometimes there’s inner and outer rings, causing you to sometimes wait for one ring to pass before you can hit an outer ring, or you will have a ring around your shooting area, with more rings on other parts of the screen, or even sometimes shake, constantly move, speed up, or shrink in completely, causing you to miss your target, or even worse, causing the key and lock to come together. There are, however, power-ups, which can help out big time. There’s a power-ups ranging from pieces of chicken that clear out big sections of the racks, to needles which can slow down the movement. These, put together with bosses, stones, and really so many different mechanics, that I can’t name or describe them all, makes Riot Rings easily one of the most interesting and fun Zuma-type games available in the AppStore.
The graphics are top notch, very polished, and retina display supported. The clouds hovering above some parts of the screen add a lot to the feel of the game, as do the great animal sounds. The controls are very tight and responsive, there’s GameCenter leaderboards, 3 star time-based rankings to try and snag, and re-playable levels along with Endless and Zen Modes to play after you’re done with the Campaign.
Riot Rings is great for all ages, and even my wife has started to obsess over it, and there’s 3 available profiles so that multiple gamers can play on one device. I can not say one bad thing about this game. It’s done extremely well, adds a lot of gameplay mechanics to the tired Zuma-like gameplay, and you’re bound to see something new every time you play. For $0.99, it’s a steal. The iPad version is $2.99, which is still a great price for all the content and gameplay you’ll get out of this game. I really can not recommend it enough, even if bubble popping isn’t your thing, this game is sure to show you a great time, and give you tons of hours of entertainment.
I’m giving Riot Rings 5 out of 5 stars, with a huge recommendation to pick it up as soon as you can.
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August 25, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Thor Blitz, $0.99 (by Heitor Barcellos) Universal


   Hello all, I am Frost and going to start with the game Thor Blitz, by one man developer Heitor Barcellos.

   Basically, Thor Blitz is a match-3 game and its obviously inspired by the nordic god of thunder, Thor, who is at war with the Olympus.

   The game plays as a normal match-3 game, theres falling pieces and you have to match them on the bottom of the screen, having multiple pieces like triangles, squared blocks, diamonds and more, a lot more. The sword on top releases the pieces, always falling in groups of 2. You control the sword by tilting your iDevice. While the pieces are falling, and by the way to do it really fast, i heard 1.1 fixed this, but i wish it could be slower, being sometimes frustating at later levels… you have to drag them wherever you want to place them, if you can, and lets you flip the pieces on mid air on once placed on the gound, but you have limited moves, because theres a bar shaped like a sword that limits your moves, making your brain work faster. The point here, as many other match-3 games is to “form horizontal, vertial or L-shaped chains of three or more pieces”… also, you can make combos with 4+ chains to collect Diamonds, if you collect the required 3 diamonds, you will cast a super power called Thunderbolt, wiping out the screen. While this is the bigger combo possible, theres also lower one like earth or aqua combos (is all about making combos to survive), all being flashy and bringing some effects to enlighten it a bit although the game looks solid, in full Retina Display.

   The game has some depth, because you gain experience, gaining levels (and here is where the God of War influence kicks in), and some levels brings you new powers and adding runes, actually being like normal pieces, to the mix, ramping the difficulty up quite a little as you progress. I wish there could be some explanations for each of them, like Pigs on Trees, who does an outstanding job at that because they just show you the piece, leaving you wondering what it does. Some of them to help you, like Mjölnir, Thors hammer, that wipes an entire line or the multi-metal can, who can be combined with anything… also added are other regular pieces, called Runes to add more difficulty to mix them together. There are also bad powers, like the Hades Touch, inverting controls.

   There two game modes and a tutorial. The game modes is Story and Ragnarok, the fist one being the normal game, unlocking runes and progression through levels and the latter is a endless survival mode with everthing unlocked from the beginning and is quite challenging. The tutorial could be more explanatory with the power-ups , but i guess the dev wants to surprise you while playing… Replayability is good because you want to see whats ahead, and unlock new runes and powers, so this gives this game a “one more time” appeal. Theres also one leaderboard with your total points for both modes to compare youself with the rest of the world, and 6 achievements.

   I think you have already have an idea of this game in mind, but you dont know how it controls… well, an update just hit the AppStore, bringing bug fixes, a shiny new icon and calibration, and all they are welcomed and much needed. Now tilting works, it has been finely tweaked, but to our behalf, because before was so slow and now its perfect, fast and precise. Dragging works well, but sometimes in later levels, when you have all those runes and pieces and the pace is getting up, some pieces will swap by mistake. And by the way, dragging hasnt been completely fixed like tilting. It still needs some work, but if you are into this match 3 games, you will ignore it completely and have a good time with this Thor Blitz. So if you are a harcore fan of the genre and craving for your next game, this may be your new game, for $0.99 is already a bargain given the hours and hours you will dive into it.

iTunes link:

Here are some promo codes for the fastest to enjoy:

TTNELWE4YR9Y
EWWJR7E33YPJ
W7HFWRLXWFW7

   If you werent fast enough to get a promo code, we will give one more away in our Twitter giveaway, follow us at @TheAppShack

   Please remember to leave an iTunes review with whatever you really think about this game, Also you can check their website for any more games from this developer at hbstark.com
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August 16, 2011 Uncategorized 0 Read more >