A look back at some of the highlights from the last week in iOS gaming…
Freebie Alert
Play in the Rugby World Cup in Spot Kick Hero
If today’s World Cup Final between New Zealand and France didn’t quite wet your whistle, then maybe this might. This isn’t a fully-fledged rugby simulator, it isn’t even remotely close to being one. But as you can probably tell by the name, Spot Kick Hero takes one of the best parts of the sport and lets you play it for free. Channel your inner Jonny Wilkinson and swipe the ball towards the posts to score points – simple as that. With 8 teams to choose from, 3 game modes and cute animations, it wouldn’t harm you to give it a ‘try’ (pun intended).
Dark Nebula 2 goes free this weekend
When Dark Nebula Episode 2 hit the App Store last year, it received heaps of praise. And I mean heaps. For an indie developer such as 1337 Game Design, having your game mentioned in the App Store Hall of Fame (Apple’s pick of the top 75 apps of all time) is quite an achievement. According to Metacritic, it was even the second-most highly-rated game for iOS in 2010. I guess you could call it successful, eh? You can get a taste of it for free this weekend, thanks to FreeAppADay.
In Dark Nebula, you tilt the device to move your character through through the levels, which include traps, opening doors, bouncing, sliding and not falling off. Basically – a labyrinth on steroids. It comes with 25 new enemies and obstacles over the first instalment, 19 action-packed levels and global leaderboards. (For the social type, there’s also Facebook integration).
Super Monkey 2 and Streets of Rage to go free next week
As part of AppAllStar’s ‘Champion Week’, SEGA’s popular Super Monkey Ball 2 will be free today, 23rd October. The game was released two years ago after seeing the success Super Monkey Ball brought to the studio. Since then, the third-person labyrinth game saw a number of price drops and increases. If you like tilting games and you want a challenge (with a few bananas and gorgeous environments), you should definitely pick up Super Monkey Ball 2 on Sunday. If you’re the old-school type who has always wanted to see Streets of Rage on their iPhone, then you’re going to have to wait until Friday, 28th October.
Hands-On Frenzy
Gameloft
Earlier this week, Kevin and Nigel visited Gameloft’s UK studio to get a taste of three major upcoming games – the recently-announced ‘Six Guns’, the highly-anticipated ‘Modern Combat 3’ and the GTA clone ‘Gangstar Rio: City of Saints’.
Six Guns is a brand new IP from the publisher, taking inspiration from RockStar’s epic Red Dead Redemption. The story, in a nutshell, is about Buck Crosshaw – an outlaw who fakes his own death and travels to a new town to start a new life, unexpectedly finding Vampires and Werewolves. Nigel explains how the combat works in the game:
“Combat is your usual 3rd-person fare. You can shoot from the hip, or tap the crosshairs to get a more accurate aim, but at the cost of slower movement. During a shootout with some angry mexicans (Nacho?), we tried out the cover system. Working very much like Silent Ops, it allows you to spring to walls and other objects to take cover from enemy fire, and shoot back in relative safety.”
Due for release in November, Six Guns will arrive with 40 missions to play through and 19 weapons in total.
Modern Combat 3 is a title I’m particularly interested in. After playing Modern Combat Sandstorm and Black Pegasus over the last two years, I knew Gameloft were going to up their game with the third instalment. Fortunately, Kevin proved me right when he wrote about his experience with the game’s revamped multiplayer system:
“Graphically, it’s shaping up nicely, with a far higher amount of details in the multiplayer maps, which are larger and more detailed. We played it on both the iPad 1, iPhone 4 and iPad 2, and it was particularly clear that the iPad 2 version sports a visual upgrade over it’s older brother, with crisper geometry and extra texture details on weapons and environments. Watch out too for the cool blur effect when running away from your best mates shotgun. No word yet on iPhone 4S improvements, but we may have to wait for future updates before we see any 4S specific features.”
Modern Combat 3: Fallen Nation will support up to 12 players online with 6 maps, 7 game modes and a century of ranks to play through. You can check out our single-player experience here, but other than that, you’ll have to wait until October 27th to get a taste yourself.
After seeing the success the first two games brought them, Gameloft are going to release Gangstar Rio: City of Saints a little later this year. Once again taking inspiration from RockStar, the game is a clear clone of Grand Theft Auto. This time round, the game will allow you to enter buildings, fly planes, customize your character, use an array of weapons, include much more life in the city, and much more. Unfortunately, the map isn’t any bigger than Miami Vindication’s – but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are 60 main missions to play through which adds up to 6-10 hours of gameplay.
Burnout Crash! iPad hands-on
Criterion’s Burnout Crash! is coming to the iPad later this year, and Nigel managed to get a taste of what it’s like on the tablet. It isn’t a fully-fledged Burnout game, so don’t get too excited, but it does take one of the best elements from the series – the Crash Mode. The developers have focused on a more arcade-style experience where scoring points is the main objective. You’re presented with an intersection in which you must create the biggest pile-up by crashing your car into as much traffic as possible. Nigel seemed to enjoy the game on the iPad, as he explains:
“….you can activate your Crashbreaker, an on-board bomb that explodes and causes traffic and other objects to fly across the game screen in a ball of flames. These cars and buildings in turn damage other cars and buildings, creating a domino effect of even more carnage. The more havoc you create the more points you get as well as multiplyers which, when powered up, will offer up various special items, some good, some bad. These include: police cars which help create roadblocks for even more pileups; an ambulance which you must allow through the chaos; and a pizza delivery truck, which when crashed into will present you with a wheel of fortune, offering up even more special items, such as sink holes which swallow up traffic. The game ends when the time runs out, or in the case of the Road Trip mode, it ends when you let five cars escape destruction.”
The iPad version will show you the whole map, whereas the iPhone counterpart will allow gamers to zoom in and pan around the environment. The final build will include simple touch and tilt-based controls when it releases at the end of November/early December.
Extraction: Project Outbreak hands-on
In this game, you take the role of an elite soldier who must rescue trapped scientists after a zombie-outbreak. Set in a scientific research facility, the other main objective is to eliminate every flesh-eating walker in sight.
As for the developers’ main objective, they wanted to create an action game that could be controlled with one finger. That’s exactly what they’ve done – to move your player, simply tap to set a marker and he’ll immediately move towards it. You can do much more without having to keep two thumbs on the screen and blocking 40% of your game view. The campaign will take up 3-4 hours of your time when it hits in November.
EA/Chillingo/PopCap winter showcase
Among Burnout Crash! and Extraction, Nigel had a sneak peak at other games in EA’s winter catalogue – including Popcorn Dragon, Superman, Trenches 2 and Hank Hazard: Stunt Hamster.
Soul Caliber is coming to iOS ‘soon’
The 1998 arcade hit ‘Soul Caliber’ is making its way to iOS, Joystiq reports. The news comes from a recent event where Carlson Choi (Namco Bandai VP of marketing) revealed that the original game will slash its way to iOS, hinting at a direct port. Unfortunately, no other details were released apart from a time frame of ‘soon’.
Become a pirate and build your own crew with Disney’s free-to-play Pirates of the Caribbean: Master of the Seas
Have you dreamt of being Jack Sparrow? Sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow? Now you can with Disney’s latest offering – Pirates of the Caribbean: Master of the Seas. Build a crew and invite your friends to join as you grow stronger and stronger, battling it out against other pirates from around the world. You can upgrade your ship and its weapons while you explore exotic islands and complete quests. This is no doubt Disney’s most social-based game out there for iOS; and the best thing is – it’s completely free-to-play.
A week in video
We’ve uploaded a few hands-on videos to accompany the previews above, so take a look to see some real action:
Week in Review
Torbjorn takes a look at yet another pouch iPhone case (and loves it): “For protection the Kenzo Leather Origami Case works really well, and it can even withstand a light drizzle outside. This is still not a case you buy for protection, but you get it for the exquisite design. Pulling up the iPhone 4/4S using this case makes it all feel even more perfect.”
Solitaire Kingdom isn’t just any solitaire game, it’s Supreme: “I got hooked really badly to Solitaire Kingdom Supreme, and it is easy to spend hours unlocking Kingdom Cards and stars. Once everything is unlocked, and you have enough stars to use whatever combination of cards you want the game starts to fade. From that point on it becomes a pure highscore game. It is still good old fun, but the addictive aspect is not there anymore. The hours up to that point is the most fun you can have with a solitaire game, and well worth experiencing.”
MultiFlip Case for iPhone 4 almost reinvents the genre, but not quite: “The MultiFlip is perfect for protection, and looks really cool. The leather intrudes slightly on the screen, but not more than other cases with this design. The only real concern I have is the home button being pressed when in a pocket or bag. Other than that I also wonder how long it takes before the flap gets lost if you take it off every time you use the phone.”
Worried about getting old? We might have found the game for you: “In the world of the movie In Time you don’t get older than twenty-five, and then you die. To live past that twenty-fifth birthday you have to work hard to buy more time. The rich lives forever, and the poor die at the height of their lives. It is a world where Will Salas fails to save his mother from dying, but still get more time than he can fathom. Now he is on the run from the police.”
Are you excited about the new Puss in Boots movie? No? Perhaps this Fruit Ninja iteration will satisfy you: “By far, the best feature of Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots is “bandito mode”. Much like Arcade mode in the original game, bandito is what will keep you coming back to this game, and is something that I would fully expect to see in the inevitable (and as of yet unannounced) Fruit Ninja sequel. There are three stages to this game mode, each one featuring four random mini games that all involve delicious fruit abuse. You get three lives to complete all three stages (twelve minigames) to make it to the final stage. I won’t spoil the final stage, as I got a good chuckle from it.”
Torbjorn reviews the ‘un-missable’ Mage Gauntlet: “Mage Gauntlet is one of those reminders that, even when the inbox fills up with a list of games to review, playing games is fun. Mage Gauntlet is great fun from the first level to the last, and then you can do it all over again, albeit harder. This is just the first part of a trilogy that is bound to become an iOS classic. Rocketcat games is also known for their loyalty to their games, and updates are bound to come. One of the first things will be making it universal for iPad as well. But don’t wait to get it, as it is initially on sale and that will not happen again.”
Unreal-powered FPS Warm Gun is slightly too cold: “Warm Gun is a real let down. The game does looks great, controls well if you select single-stick mode (a la Gameloft shooters), and when it works without connection issues you’ll have a fun shootout. However, with very limited options (death match only), only four players (3 plus you) and an inconsistent, lag infested, online experience, there is little in the way of a game to recommend right now. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like my shooters luke warm. This game really needs to go back into the oven until golden brown and steamy hot.”
