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Epic War TD is a pretty pretty and solid tower defense title.

It’s also a blatant ripoff of Starcraft.

I mean, seriously, you take a look at the units running past you, and they are pretty well exactly Starcraft units with little changes. Oh, look, here’s some Zerglings, only they’re slightly glow-y. Here are some Battleships, only the stripes are a bit different. Here are some Thors, only they’re just a little boxier. It’s kind of amazing in that way. What’s more amazing is that the towers aren’t really Starcraft ripoffs too. I was shocked by that.

Still, if you can get over someone painstakingly remaking the enemy models from Starcraft, this is a really solid tower defense game. Many tower defense games will get you into a situation where, even though enemies have weaknesses, you can mostly just spam one tower and win. In Epic War, enemies are near impervious to damage that isn’t by their weakness. You could take a guy down with just machine gun towers if they’re weak to missiles, but you’re going to need a shit-ton of towers, and they’ll probably go down so slow you’ll let several slip past in the meantime. You really have to make sure you have a wide variety of towers, and look ahead to incoming waves to see if you need to build more of a certain type to survive it. It’s pretty useful that way.

The game also has a pretty nice tower upgrade system. In most tower defense games, you just upgrade when you have spare money, and it’s just a straight bonus. In this, you upgrade damage, fire rate, and range separately. The costs jump up very quickly, but an upgraded tower is much better than a couple of towers with no upgrades. It makes decisions hard: do you need another tower, or should you save up for another boost to the towers you have? It’s solid.

Other than that, it’s just tower defense. There are maps, and difficulty modes. The interface on my iPad works fantastically. I haven’t misclicked anything yet. It’s not reinventing the whole tower defense thing, but it’s a really good tower defense thing. It’s just a shame it’s such a Starcraft knockoff. If they had just taken the time to come up with their own enemy designs, it would be much easier to recommend. Still, it’s not bad, for the dollar I paid.

There was a fourth of July sale on the app store, because seriously, any occasion is a reason for an app store sale. I had been talking to Cara about games she should get. I knew she liked driving games, and I saw Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit HD on there for a buck. I really enjoyed the console version, so I figured it was worth a try for a dollar, and maybe I could recommend it to her! So, of course, I bought it. Come on, I buy everything on iOS. Are you really surprised?

Hot Pursuit on iOS is fairly impressive. The visuals are very high quality for the platform, and it has lots of the features of the normal game, like an Autolog that you can use to compare scores with your friends. Well, if your friends are actually on an EA account and have friended you. It’s a shame it doesn’t use Gamecenter. But yeah, it’s got all the little things you’d expect if you’d played the console game.

The game controls well, too. It defaults to an “auto-accelerate” mode, which is really just the best for the way racing games on the platform work. You can swipe up on one side to use your turbo, tap buttons to drop your spike strips or call in roadblocks, and pressing on the left side is your break, for tight turns and such. Oh, and you turn with motion controls. They all work pretty great, though the default setting for the motion controls is way, way too insensitive. It’s hard to make careful turns with it on the defaults. After I cranked the sensitivity most of the way up, though, I didn’t have many problems. Well, besides my normal lack of driving game ability, anyway.

While it is quite fun, there are bits of the game that really stick out, because the rest is so polished. The cars, for example, have no damage modelling at all. You “wreck” a car, but it doesn’t look like it’s been harmed in any way. I suppose that’s just a compromise they made to make it run smooth on iOS, but since the game does the same sorts of “LOOK AT THIS CRASH!” slow motion camera moves that the console game does, it really kind of sticks out. The other part that sticks out is the track design. After playing a bunch of rounds, it becomes clear that the game consists of a lot of track “segments” that they stitch together in different ways for the various courses you race on. It wouldn’t stick out so much if some of the segments, like a bit where you go through a tunnel, weren’t so distinctive to draw your attention to it. The segments are also fairly long for something that wants to be remixed like this. It’s a strange decision, to be sure.

Basically, it’s a nice little port of the console game. It works, and it is fun, though there are more straight-up race missions than the console version, and since I only like to blow up cars, it didn’t last as long for me. It’s not the kind of completely new and really polished and fun game experience as, say, Dead Space was, but EA knows how to make an iOS counterpart to their games, certainly. If you wish you could drive a car on iOS, this seems a damn fine option, especially at a dollar. At the normal price of ten bucks, it’s a bit pushing it, though. But again, any excuse will be reason for an iOS sale, so throw it on App Shopper and enjoy awhile from now!

One of the Free Apps things mentioned one day that Backbreaker 2 was free. I seemed to recall Backbreaker being a big name attempt at sort of recreating NFL Blitz, and that sounded like an entertaining little game, so I picked it up. Why not? It was free, and while I don’t give a shit about football, I did enjoy Blitz, so who knows?

It’s not really anything like a game, really.

Backbreaker 2 seems to be two minigames that are vaguely football themed. You make a little football dude with some very limited options. (But it does put your name on the back of the jersey, so that’s kind of cool.) Then you either attempt to make touchdowns, or tackle people making touchdowns. Both games are basically the same. You use tilt to move your dude around, and to its credit, it responds pretty well. If you run over colored parts of the field, you get extra points, but you’re mostly trying to dodge defenders and get to the guy you’re trying to tackle or the endzone. In the standard mode, you also can “Showboat” and “Super Showboat” for lots of points, but that slows you down a lot, so you have to decide if you’re safe enough to do it and for how long, which I suppose adds an element of strategy to scoring points? Something like that. You can also spin or sidestep with buttons on the screen.

That’s really it. There is “Endurance” and “Challenge” modes, but I see no difference between them. I guess Endurance will continue forever if you don’t fail? I don’t know. There’s also a huge ad for some XBLA Backbreaker game every time you turn the game on, so that’s fantastic.

I can’t complain, as it was free, but this really wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted a silly, fun Football game. I could see a game with heavy hits like Blitz that I played by drawing plays on the iPad or something. I envisioned a game that was way more than this is. It’s just a high score fest, and since I give no shits about football, it really doesn’t have any appeal with it’s theme to keep me coming back. I wouldn’t tell you to pay money for it, even if you were a football person though. There has to be a cooler, actual football game on the service. I just don’t claim to know what it is.

I listen to all those Asymmetric podcasts, and one of the games I’ve heard them mention over and over was Gemcraft. I didn’t know much about it, but I guess it was a flash game they really enjoyed, and it got mentioned a lot. One day, I noticed it was on the App Store. Gemcraft HD! I decided to give it a try. High definition crafting of gems! What could go wrong?

Nothing, really. It’s a fine tower defense game.

There’s a map with maps on it you play tower defense on. When you get there, you tower defense. But where the twist comes in are the gems. Appropriate, no? Basically, towers, which sit on the side of the path and shoot, and traps, which sit on the path and attack people walking over it, are powered with magical gems. These gems have properties, like Splash Damage, Slowing, Poison, or High Crit Chance. You have to build the tower or trap, but then you also have to buy a gem to put it in. These gems affect what kind of towers you have. Since the cost of building a tower increases with each one you build, making the towers you have better is of the utmost importance. Upgrading a tower simply requires putting a better gem into the tower. You can simply buy more expensive gems, if you want.
However, what makes it interesting is that you can also combine gems to level them up, Horadric Cube-style. Two gems of the same level can be combined to make one gem of one tier higher. What’s more, it’ll have properties of both gems. So if you combine a Poison and a Splash Damage gem, you’ll get a more powerful gem that does both. You can basically make towers that are jacks of all trades as you upgrade, having a little of all abilities, or focus just on certain ones. It’s a bit of strategy that makes for a nice Tower Defense change.

As you complete levels, you unlock new modes on that map, which is nice. You also gain skill points you can use for overall growth of your character, letting you lower the costs of towers and whatnot, which is appreciated, though not particularly overwhelmingly important, from what I played. There are a ton of levels and modes, too. This was a dollar well-spent, if I actually worried about amount of content.

In reality, though, I found the game really damn hard. Because you can mix and match your towers so much, and can’t cover your ass by building lots of towers, it makes figuring out what to build really hard. I quickly got to the point where I simply wasn’t mixing my gem types together enough, or was building just one too few towers, because I thought I needed to save my money to upgrade gems quicker. I understand that’s the strategy, but after the first few levels, you start to not have any margin of error. Maybe people who beat the flash games would be prepared for that, but I kind of wasn’t. I enjoyed making all sorts of weird tower combinations, but the game quickly told me I needed to min/max, and I wasn’t quite sure how.

I do have to say, though, that the fact that you can turn the game up to 3x speed, if you want, is a fantastic addition every tower defense game should have. Makes the game so, so much better to play. Being able to pause and issue commands was nice, too, though that’s not as required as the speed thing, as I could see why a developer wouldn’t want you to be able to take action while paused.

There is a shit-ton of tower defense here for a dollar. If you want some of that, go for it! If you enjoyed the Flash games, I’d think this would be a good way to give back, too. If you don’t like tower defense, though, this sure as hell won’t sell you on it. It’s a twist that makes tower defense much more finicky and such. I enjoyed it, but I put it down when I hit that wall. Got plenty else to play instead.

Oh fuck, Tiny Tower.

Tiny Tower came out, and I have been playing this bullshit NONSTOP. It’s so fantastic, and free, and you should get it.

Basically, Tiny Tower is Sim Tower meets Farmville. That makes it sound not great, but it’s better than that.

I’ve never played Farmville, but here’s what I know as the bad parts of Farmville: it constantly hassles your Facebook friends, and if you don’t constantly check in, you not only don’t gain benefits, but lose the work you’ve done. To be efficient, you have to pay money, as well. Lots of money.

Tiny Tower doesn’t do that.

The only real interaction with your friends is that you can look at their towers and compare them. That’s cool, and no hassle involved. While you do gain benefits by constantly checking in and restocking your businesses, if you let it set for an hour, a day, a week, you don’t lose the progress you’ve made. What you’ve stocked doesn’t go “bad.” You just aren’t slowly accumulating wealth. When you come back and play again, nothing will be fucked up. Also, there are plenty of ways in-game to earn “Tower Bux,” which is the for-pay currency. It makes it so you can’t do every single thing without paying, but if you prioritize, you can do some of the stuff you’d like. It makes it so the game is fun without paying money, which is really a flaw of a lot of these sorts of social games that I’ve seen.

Really, though, the game has a lot of style. It has a pixel aesthetic that works, and isn’t just used for nostalgia’s sake. It’s exciting to see what crazy new businesses you’re going to open, as you don’t get to choose. You just pick between 5 areas: Food, Retail, Service, Creative, and Recreation, and the game builds you one at random. You may get a bar, if you build a Food place, or you may get a Frozen Yogurt shop.
You can earn extra Tower Bux and get bonuses if you put the various “Bitzens” into their dream jobs, as well, though you have to build apartment floors for them to stay in so they can work in your building too. They all have stats relating to the five different types of businesses: put more skilled people into jobs they like, and they restock and sell product faster, so you can build more floors, so you can build more businesses, so you can make more money to build more floors, and so on.

It’s addicting seeing your little empire build up, and after you get going, there’s very little maintenance, just a few button presses here and there, with sporadic decision-making moments of who to employ where and what to build next. You are constantly checking in, if you want things to build quickly, but you don’t have to.

I love it. It crashes whenever I open the game outside of wifi, because it can’t connect to Game Center, but other than that? Awesome. Way better than their previous game, Pocket Frogs, and Pocket Frogs is pretty sweet. If you don’t hate this sort of game in general, at least give this one a try. It’s a fun time. Also, add me and let me see your tower. I’m poetfox. I have a paintball course on like floor 16.

Words with Friends was all like “We have a new game called Hanging with Friends!” And I’m like, “Words with Friends people, I dislike that Zynga bought you, but you’re still like, one of if not the best multiplayer game on iOS. I will try your game.”

So I did.
It’s kind of a buggy mess.

The game itself is solid design. It uses the same asynchronous multiplayer sort of style that makes Words with Friends so fun. Basically, you’re playing Hangman that way. Only, if course, people aren’t being hanged. They’re holding balloons that pop. But still. Basically, you draw a bunch of Words with Friends tiles, and build a word. Your score for the word goes into a meter that fills up. When you fill it up, you earn 20 coins! In any case, you then send your word off. Your friend gets the word, and tries to guess it, Hangman style, with number of guesses based on the size of the word, (More letters equals less guesses) with the last vowel in the word always automatically revealed. If they fail, they lose a balloon. If they win, they don’t. Either way, they send you a word. It keeps going back and forth until someone loses all 5 balloons.

For each round, you get 3 hints you can use. “Suspects” highlights four letters, one of which must be in the word. This is by far the most useful. “Extinguisher” labels 4 letters that aren’t in the word for you. This rarely hits the letters you are thinking of picking, and tends to not be useful. “Revive” essentially gives you one extra guess, as it “undoes” one wrong guess. You get one free use of these a round, but can “buy” additional uses for 20 coins.

Buying those uses is the one thing that seems a bit silly, though. It just seems like it would be worth your time to play a lot of games with randoms that you aren’t trying to win to build up coins to win the games you care about. Of course, this will be mitigated once they get the coin store in the game, where I assume you’ll be able to trade all these coins I’ve been stockpiling for little avatar things and whatnot. That’s what I hope anyway. I don’t get the coin thing.

The real problem with the game, though, is how glitchy it is. There are serious bugs in the game as it is. You press buttons, and nothing happens. You ask the game to show you what another player does, and stuff just doesn’t show up on the screen. It’s even stuff like your little avatars showing the “happy” expression when something bad happens. It’s really silly. I mean, clearly, they’ll patch it at some point, but it’s on the verge of unplayable at the moment, which is a shame.

Eventually, this game will be great. Hangman is a much more even playing field game. It’s fun regardless of skill level, whereas I can see some people being turned off to being utterly crushed in Scrabble, as I am over and over with some people I play Words with Friends with. Still, it’s got a free version. It may be worth your time to try. But maybe wait until they patch it once.

Rage was one of those iOS games that people wouldn’t shut up about how pretty it looked. “Man, it’s like a real game!” they said. The last game they said that about was Infinity Blade, which I scoffed at, until I played it, and then I had a decent amount of fun. So, you know, Rage was a dollar so I decided to try that too. Why not, right?

Rage is certainly a game.

Well, okay, I will say this about Rage. It proved to me that motion controls for a shooter actually work on iOS. I would have never thought it! But I turned it on to try it, and it actually seems like a legit way to play. After you get used to it, it makes whipping around quickly to hit multiple targets way easier than using a virtual thumbstick on the screen. It’s totally something you have to get used to, but I understand now why people would want it as an option.

Now the game that you play that way? Mm.

Rage is essentially a light gun game. You have several stages that your character walks through without you really controlling where he goes. You shoot at mutant to kill them, while picking up bonus money, health, and ammo. You can also shoot targets for more money, and dodge rocks enemies throw at you with a dodge button. You go for high score, and that’s about it, though I suppose there is a bit of a challenge surviving all the way through a level your first go-round on not-easy.

There’s definitely a little bit of finesse, I suppose. You have three weapons: a shitty pistol that has unlimited ammo, an assault rifle that looks like an AK-47 that can fire fast but only has marginally more punch than the pistol, and a shotgun that reloads slow as fuck but can kill most enemies in one shot, especially if it’s to the head. You have to balance finding ammo with shooting, and not go all trigger happy, because the pistol is not great to be stuck with. I actually started starting some runs out using the pistol, just to build up a surplus of ammunition for the other guns before I started really getting swarmed near the end.

Still, in the end, it’s kind of a light gun game without the visceral, fun feel of having a light gun in your hand while you play. Which does make it lose something. There’s also this announcer guy who they obviously think is supposed to be funny or endearing but really kind of falls flat, as far as I’m concerned. He’s like Mad Moxxie, but much less cool. I kind of wished he’d shut up after awhile, and then I remembered I could mute my iPad! So there’s that.

Anyway, it is a nice showpiece for how pretty 3D graphics on iOS can be, but it’s really just a little high score game to build hype for Rage. Which is weird, since who knows when that will be out and Rage has been out on iOS for awhile now. If you’re desperate to shoot things on iOS, I suppose there are probably worst uses for your dollar, but I wasn’t too impressed with it. Once I saw all the areas, I was kind of done.

Some people on Talking Time were talking about Tiny Tower, a game coming out, and they were like “I’m so excited and it will be good because it’s by the people who made Pocket Frogs.” That video looked good, and I had seen Pocket Frogs a lot on the iTunes store, and it cost nothing, so I gave it a download.

Holy shit, Pocket Frogs.

Pocket Frogs is basically frog-based Viva Pinata, only a bit more straightforward. You get frogs of different patterns. By breeding them, you create more frogs. You can breed two frogs together that you have tamed and are in your frog habitats, or you can go hunting for frogs in the Pond minigame and sex them up. New frogs are born, and you can mate them, or sell them for coins. You buy new habitats for your frogs, special breeds to play with, and decorations. As you breed more frogs, you level up, and unlock more complex frog types. You can play little minigames with your frogs to make them happy, if you want, and win prizes. Mostly, though, you’re trying to breed expensive frogs to sell for capital, and frogs to match up with daily challenges and so forth in the game.

The deal is that it’s microtransaction based. You can buy stamps to make items you buy or send to friends show up faster, or potions to make your frogs mature and be happy faster. If you don’t do that, everything takes a set amount of time to happen.

Personally, I love that you have to wait. It makes the game a very low time investment. I check on my frogs like once or twice a day to breed some new ones, make some money, and so forth, and then I don’t have to worry about it. Things don’t go bad if you don’t check in. There’s no punishment for playing slow. It actually kind of rewards you for it, because you aren’t pressed to spend money. It’s pretty fantastic in that way. It’s a complete game without spending tons of cash. I love that. That’s smart microtransaction design, and I appreciate it.

It’s free, and it can be a timesink if you really, really want to maximize the value on all your frogs. (I don’t.) But it’s really cute, and a great time without spending any money. I’m poetfox on Plus+. Friend me and send me a frog or something! I’m really enjoying it, and it really makes me look forward to Tiny Tower, to be sure.

When you read a name like DEATH RALLY, well, you assume you will have DEATH and also RALLY. You also assume you’ll have an experience that is EXTREME, or X-TREME if you prefer.

I don’t know how X-TREME it really is, but it’s not too bad of a game.

There’s some comic-book style story when you start the game. It’s got good production values, but for the most part, you’re just racing, so it’s not really important. Still, it sets the tone for the game as being an incredibly polished and flashy-looking game for the platform. This is a top-down racer, like, say, RC-Pro-Am or, say, Rally King. Something along those lines. Of course, this is a DEATH RALLY so you’ve got a car equipped with guns and various other weapons, and can simply explode other racers instead of out-race them.

Frankly, I really appreciate the controls in this game. They realized how frustrating it would be to have a gas button on the touch screen, so instead they have a fairly large virtual analog stick that does gas based on how far you move the stick to the edges of it. It works way better than having a gas button, especially with this sort of top-down game. There’s also a big button to fire your weapons, but that button is only for your special weapons. Your basic machine gun always fires if there’s something vaguely interesting in front of you, so you’re never having to hold down the button. That’s just smart. There’s also two different camera modes. I find camera mode two, which keeps the orientation of your car set and rotates the track, to be WAY more usable than the default, which keeps the camera angle on the track set, but maybe it’s different for different people and I appreciate having the option.

In each race, there is a bunch of other racers, one of which is the “boss” who is likely going to win and who is hard to kill. You get money based on how many people you kill, where you place, and whether or not you took out the boss during the race. You can use this money to repair your car (which is never very expensive, so you’ll never be able to NOT repair your car, even if you get last place) and upgrade things such as your car’s armor, handling, and top speed. You can also upgrade the various weapons on your cars. These special weapons can be moved between cars, but things such as armor enhancements are on a per-car basis, so if you’re planning on doing a lot of car-hopping, it may be better to focus on your weapons first. In general, I find it extremely hard to win races just racing. I’ve done much better trying to explode all the competition so that I’m second place by default, because there’s only two cars left alive. Still, sometimes in spite of myself, I drive really well and win without much carnage. I suppose it’s good the game gives you the option to do things either way.

While you drive, you pick up “parts” of additional courses, cars, and weapons, which eventually unlock as you collect them. The game also has a big meter of your overall completion collecting all this shit on the main menu, so you know how much there is to unlock. There aren’t a ton of courses, but there are a decent amount, and the game uses mirrored versions of them all as well, for more variety. The developers have also put out tons of free updates with more new cars and courses to unlock over the life of the game. Since I bought it, they’ve put out at least one major update, and I know there have been several in the past before I bought it on sale, so that’s awesome that it’s being supported.

If you like those sorts of old-school, top down racers, Death Rally is an easy sell. It’s really polished and a lot of fun. I’m not sure if it’s worth the premium otherwise. It does eventually devolve into doing the same sorts of races over and over to collect more parts and money to upgrade again and again, which is fun in its way, but it doesn’t feel like it’s for any real purpose, just generic completion’s sake, which doesn’t engage me for too long. Still, it was totally worth the dollar I paid for it at the time. I’ve enjoyed myself.

As per usual, I pick up games on the iPod that people randomly mention are free when they are free. A few weeks back, I picked up a game called Dirt, which has indie art game written all over it. I’m going to discuss it today, spoilers and all, but if you want to know whether you should buy it for the buck it currently is, I would say no. As a free flash game or something, I’d tell you to try it, but I can’t say it’s deep or cool enough to be worth money when you can get so many better games on iOS for that price. Still, I did play it to competition and it was probably about an hour and a half or two hours spread out over a couple 15 minute play sessions over some weeks I didn’t feel bad about spending, so, you know, decide as you will. I will also say, though, that it makes a horrible iPad game, because you have to constantly rotate your device. I ended up playing it on my iTouch because of this.

In any case, spoilers start now.

You’re a cat skeleton with boots. You can dig in any direction, which is cool, I suppose. Rotating the device changes the gravity, so you can essentially dig up or down or wherever you’d like by turning the screen around. Basically all you do is explore this underground area like this, digging away dirt and seeing what’s there.

As you search, you find weird background and items, as well as gems. The only real HUD element is a pause button, which brings up a list of gem types and a goal number. Once you collect a certain number of gems, stuff happens, with the prompt “Dirt is starting to remember.” You know, the spoiler stuff.

It turns out each gem represents a member of the family that Dirt belonged to. Once you hit the first couple of milestones, each with a talking centipede who speaks for each of the characters in their color text, you are told, by death, to dig to the surface, where you see the family over your kitty cat grave. This basically made me go “Aww, but that’s short and kind of lame.” But then I realized I had new gem goals.

From then on, each gem goal will create a room where you will see a picture from Dirt’s happy home life. You’ll see how the kitty cat related to everyone in the family, and then, finally, you collect enough to find Death again, who tells you it’s time to go, and you start falling forever, watching scenes of the kitty cat wasting away and dying. Eventually, you hit the beginning of the game again, since the game started with “You are Dirt. You’ve been falling for days.” There you go.

The game is taking itself seriously, but it’s choosing a really mundane topic. Yes, the little girl in the family is sick with something, and Dirt is a good companion, but for the most part, you don’t learn anything unexpected about Dirt. Dirt is just a cat with a terrible name. In addition, there just simply aren’t enough little doodads and backgrounds to find in the game world in general. They’re really cool to try to piece together what they are at the beginning, but eventually you start seeing the same stuff over and over again, and it loses its mystery. Finally, the art just… isn’t great. I mean, it’s certainly better than I could draw, and the sprite art of the actual gameplay is fine, but all the art of the flashbacks and stuff just doesn’t do it for me. It doesn’t feel professional, and it hurts any level of attachment you could potentially have with these characters. It’s unfortunate.

This is a good try, and a good start. Digging around and exploring is great! I just felt like it needed a few more passes to be truly meaningful and effective. It has all the mechanical elements it needs, but I just left not feeling much for anyone. I wanted to finish it to write this review, not because I was engaged. Oh well.