There’s a lot to be said for novelty. This doesn’t sound like a terribly original concept for a mobile game: a cute giant cat roams the streets setting free animals held captive by evil scientists. But when it’s your streets, well, then you’ve got my interest. The level select screen is an OpenStreetMap of your …
Hundreds is confident: it sees no reason to explain itself, and assumes you’ll figure it out. That’s admirable, but there’s a fine line between confidence and, well, being a prick. Thankfully, Hundreds isn’t a prick – most of the time. And it’s right, you will figure it out. Touching a circle makes it grow, and …
I’m sure we all remember The Incredibles’ back-story of superheroes giving up their jobs, due to being sued by citizens suffering from whiplash and such after being rescued. Double Fine’s free iOS download Middle Manager of Justice also taps into Pixar’s idea of going behind the scenes in the world of superheroes, giving you the …
There are at least two things going for Verticus. First, it’s got Stan Lee’s name above it, and that’s going to generate a fair smattering of interest. Second, it’s vaguely reminiscent of that sky dive, which is still reasonably fresh in the collective mind. I do mean vaguely though: thankfully alien attacks weren’t one of …
So Peter Molyneux’s “social experiment” Curiosity – what’s inside the cube has been out for two days now, and at the time of writing more than 396,000 people have tapped away at the giant cube, destroying more than 163 million cubelets. The big question remains – what is inside the cube? We’d like to offer …
Punch Quest is free. And it’s brilliant. What more needs to be said? Let’s see. I quite often invoke Jetpack Joyride as a comparison for mobile games, and I’m going to have to again here: from your character bursting through the wall at the start, through the endless running and classy 16-bit graphics, to the …
An imagined conversation Tom: “Sonic Jump? That’s just a rip off of Doodle Jump.” Dick: “Ah, no, the original Sonic Jump was released for non-smart phones back in 2006, pre-dating Doodle Jump by a good three years.” Harry: “SHUT UP I DON’T CARE IT’S NO FUN.” Some elaboration Functionally, there’s nothing wrong with Sonic Jump. …
Mobile developers like to make life hard for themselves, it would seem: platformers are thriving on mobiles, yet touch screens don’t have the delicious precision of physical buttons that the genre demands. Rayman Jungle Run notably rose to the challenge recently, but here are a couple of other recent examples that tickled my platforming fancy. …
The idea of Supermagical is neat: whack a story and some light RPG elements onto the classic bubble-popping game. It looks and sounds fantastic. What a shame, then, that the game goes out of its way to make playing it a real bloody chore. Turning the classic mechanic on its side makes absolutely no difference, …
They say that it’s a fine line between love and hate. What does that mean? Nobody knows that. But it might explain why I ended up playing a game I don’t really like as much as one that warmed my cockles something silly. Super Hexagon version: iPhone I fully expected to love Super Hexagon. Reviews …
Note to all: this is how to transfer a game to mobiles. Okay, so it’s not a conversion of Rayman Origins per se – but that’s the point. The wonderful UbiArt framework has been retained, but the controls stripped down to accommodate the touch screen. Which leaves a sticky condensed residue of the essence of …
Mobile games are released at such an unrelenting rate, that I don’t generally find pre-release coverage very helpful. If I can’t click through and buy it immediately, then there’s every chance I’ll have forgotten about it by the time it’s released. But it’s been a pretty lovely week for announcements. Rayman Jungle Run Everyone loves …
All week I’ve been confronted by frightening, freakish visions on every street corner. That’s right, I’ve been in Edinburgh for the Fringe. Boom! (And, more relevantly, also playing a bit of augmented reality iPhone thing Ghostbusters Paranormal Blast.) It’s a neat set up: a Google Map of your immediate neighbourhood displays calls for you to …
The freemium model is a bit of a curious fit for an official Olympics game. It doesn’t quite give the right message, does it? If you want to succeed, you need to build on your natural talent through plenty of good solid practice. Or just bung us a few pennies and we’ll sort you out. …
Tiny Wings was Apple’s 2011 game of the year in Europe, and deservedly so: it’s lovely. A delightful teaser trailer for Tiny Wings 2 surfaced last week, with a release date of 12th July 2012. Collective conclusions were leapt to, but we should have been looking more closely at developer Andreas Illiger’s Twitter stream: There …