The most common complaint leveled against mobile gaming is the seeming lack of "console-quality experiences" - which, despite being a bit of a moot point (it's a tablet, not a console, correct?), is grounded in some real complaints. There are too many money-hungry free-to-play games, and way too many physics puzzlers and endless runners in the App Store - so when Firaxis and 2K announced a fully-featured ...
Shelter is a zombie-themed card game for mobile devices. Card games seem to be really hot now and zombies are never not the flavour of the week, so the combination of the two is something I'm amazed hasn't happened on this scale before. Shelter takes both ideas and pushes them to their max, mixing deep card mechanics with a Walking Dead inspired graphic novel style of storytelling. As an idea, and in many ...
Not long after the release of Kingdom Rush on iOS in 2011, Ironhide Studios announced a sequel for the game - and save for a few screenshots released during the holiday season, they kept a pretty tight lid on development of their next tower defense title, which finally hit the App Store last week. I don't know if I'd call it a true 'sequel' - but as a version 1.5 of sorts, Frontiers brings the same fantastic ...
For the most part, iOS and Android ports of board games are pretty straightforward, relying on the convenience of having classic tabletop titles without all the plastic pieces, dies, and paper objects needed for the physical product. Warhammer Quest is a different kind of digital interpretation, taking the multiplayer board game and transforming it into a enjoyable, but familiar-feeling tactical dungeon crawler.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is one of the touchstone RPG's of my life. It's the first BioWare game I had ever played, having missed the large majority of them as a person who spent most of my time on consoles as opposed to PC. Thinking back, it might even be the first proper western RPG I played as I spent most of my RPG hours playing games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Who'd have guessed at ...
Designing an endless runner game that catches the attention of the public must be a challenge. The App store is flooded with them, because they are great for quick gaming sessions and they don't typically require complex inputs from the player. How does Dead Ahead set itself apart from the pack?
NarcoGuerra is the latest in a series of 'Game the News' games. The idea is to take a real world issue, in this case the ongoing battle between Mexican police forces and drug cartels, and make it a little easier to understand how complicated the situation truly is. But is NarcoGuerra a good game, or just a fancy news piece?
The original ports of the classic Sonic franchise to iOS were not so well-received: running on a terrible, cheap-looking emulator, the various Sega classics (be it Sonic, Streets of Rage, or others) just looked and played like crap. Enter Christian Whitehead, who Sega brought in to develop ports of Sonic games using his engine. The first result of this, 2011's Sonic CD for iOS was such a success, it only made ...
Grey-bearded old gamers love to spin tales of the glorious days back when playing a game meant running text adventures on a university mainframe. Good times indeed, grandpa, but there’s a slightly less-grizzled generation of gamers who are too young to remember sneaking in a game of Zork between computer science classes. This generation can still recall the many attempts to simulate computer adventure games, ...
Star Command is easily some of the most fun I have ever had on iOS and is a game that you almost have to have if you play on your phone or tablet. If you've heard of Star Command at all, you will likely understand the appeal straight away. Take a starship and build all the rooms inside, then hire a bunch of crew members and take to the stars while looking at some interesting planets (always from a distance, ...
In general terms, if you've played one LEGO title, you've played 'em all. Though each series features different, property-specific mechanics (like the spells in the Harry Potter titles), the concept never changes. Watch a cut scene, enter a room, smash and bash everything in sight, solve a puzzle, repeat. There's certainly nothing wrong with this; when it comes to simplistic third-person platformers, LEGO's ...
Have you ever been tempted to knock over a few mailboxes? How about whilst driving a tank and whilst dressed as Kim Jong Un? Mobile games need to be easy to pick up, easy to play, humorous (or at least accessible) and playable in short snippets over a long time. Mailboxing is all of those things. It's such an ideal mobile game, in fact, that it may just end up being the new must-play on the App Store.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have had a rough run the last two decades; what began as a mid-80s comic book grew into a cultural phenomenon in the early 1990s. Most kids I grew up with had the TMNT lunch box, the action figures, we watched the cartoons... and then over time, with a few bad studio film sequels and a failed live-action TV show, the pizza-loving turtles slowly disappeared from the public eye, ...
Asphalt 6: Adrenaline continues the Asphalt series with new cars, new tracks, and more intense racing action on mobile devices. Visually, this game is as close to Triple-A as it gets on Android and iOS, but the title reveals the design challenges inherent in creating a racing game for mobile devices. Asphalt 6 is fun and compelling enough to have kept me interested all the way through, but there are a few ...
The story behind Vlambeer's Ridiculous Fishing is almost as interesting as the game itself - a frustrating, occasionally inspirational story about an indie developer fighting a 'clone war' against another title that essentially stole the heart of their fishing game. But after three years in development, the Dutch developers finally released their arcade fisher to the App Store, where praise was rightfully heaped ...
Every so often, I find myself browsing through the catalog of games available on the iOS App Store. Most of the time I find nothing that particularly catches my eye, and I move on to other things. Other times, there's Tekken Card Tournament. Now for most people, it's the "Tekken" part that catches the eye. Not so in my case. As you may be aware, I'm frequently suckered in by the addition of cards to any ...
There are thousands upon thousands of developers and publishers selling their games and apps in Apple's mobile marketplace - but there's only a few handful of those companies whose every release piques the interest of hardcore iOS-heads. Illusion Labs is definitely one of these companies, the minds behind App Store classics like Touchgrind (and Touchgrind BMX), Labryinth 2, the memorable puzzle-platformer ...
Sand Slides has a very simple premise. Coloured sand will fall from the top of the screen, and you must make sure that that sand falls into the right coloured funnel. You do this by creating slides, using the touch screen to direct the grains as they drop. This starts off fairly easy - some of the sand drops right down into the right funnel - but it's not long before you're having to crisscross slides and ...
You've proably heard of Rogue-likes, but have you ever heard of a Snake-like? Unlikely. Obviously someone played a lot of Snake a child and thought 'You know what would make this better? If it had some light RPG elements!' And so it was that Nimble Quest was born.
At first glance, Warner Bros.'s Injustice: Gods Among Us seems thoroughly unappealing: it is a watered-down version of its console counterpart, with simplified controls and repetitive gameplay design, topped off by the ever-damning price tag of 'free', never a promising sign for a licensed App Store game. Despite all this working against it, the mobile version of Injustice: Gods Among Us is actually quite a bit ...
If you had the opportunity to look one year into your future would you do it? Would you want to see if a new business venture paid off, or if a lost love might return to your life? Perhaps you'd see something terrible; would you be able to avert disaster?
For some baseball fans, the Out of the Park Baseball series appears too dense and text-based to be enjoyed. At first, it can be – managing an entire baseball organization from top to bottom is no easy task. But the beauty of the series is how user-friendly it is, allowing players to sculpt their own experience, allowing both hardcore stat heads and casual GM-wannabes to enjoy the game in their own way. The ...
Badland might be crammed into the category of an “Autorunner”, the genre of gaming where characters zoom along the screen and players just need to hit a jump button at the right moment. But the character in Badland doesn’t actually run; it’s a weird furball that flies, and players have to tap the screen of the iPhone to flap its wings and keep it afloat. It’s an “Autoflapper” if you will, but that doesn’t even ...
Many's the day I spent in my childhood trying to combine my two favorite things: Card games and Chess. I never quite succeeded. When I first fired up The Wild Kingdoms for review, I found that I was clearly not the only one who had ever dreamed of combining these two disparate genres. But is The Wild Kingdoms everything I dreamed of?
50 is a simple game. Flick a coin down a wooden plank with painted numbers and make up to 50. No more, no less. Sometimes the numbers are in a different place, sometimes the surface area they cover is a little smaller and you’ll need to target more accurately, but for all intents and purposes, scoring 50 is all you need to worry about.
Aliens Need Burgers has a goofy and semi-charming premise: aliens who love hamburgers come to Earth to relieve us of our beloved cow meat. Fortunately enough, there's a satellite worker hanging outside the atmosphere in space, ready to defend the world from the incoming threats. Unfortunately, the game itself doesn't employ any of this creativity, and Aliens Need Burgers is another forgettable touch-screen experience.
Fun Run is a multiplayer mobile game that can eat your "free" time! Whenever you sit down for a few minutes and you gonna have your mobile phone in hands - I bet you will turn this game on. The game allows you to race against some random online players or your friends. It's easy to control but gives lots of fun and satisfaction when you finish the race 1st.
Introduction New Soccer Star has been around for a long time, but its jump to mobile devices has rocketed the franchise to new heights. Not only did its creator, Simon Read, win a BAFTA over other, more established franchises like FIFA and Forza, but sales have been high and critical reception seems to have been very positive as well. With great reviews, a place in award show history and a renewed interest in ...
