Touch Arcade

Fantastic Action Platformer 'Goblin Sword' Updated with Tons of New Content and MFi Controller Support Posted: 24 Feb 2015 12:03 PM PST One of the best mobile games of 2014 was Goblin Sword [$1.99], an action platformer with RPG trappings from two-man studio Gelato Games. With drop-dead gorgeous pixel art, flawless controls, a lengthy campaign and just enough character upgrading and customization elements, everything just fell into place with Goblin Sword and we effortlessly awarded it 5 stars in our original review. That was all way back in September of last year though, and while it's taken a bit of time, a huge new update has just been released for Goblin Sword which adds in all sorts of goodies. The major new feature in the 1.5 update of Goblin Sword is an entire new chapter titled The Lost City that features 16 new levels that take place in a brand new area. The new chapter can be accessed after beating the first boss in the Dark Caves. Along with the new levels are 2 new bosses, more than 10 new enemy types, and a number of new relics, weapons and costumes for your hero. Gelato has created a new trailer showing off some of this new content, but if you want to experience it for yourself you may want to skip the trailer as spoilers abound. In addition to the new content, this update also includes full MFi controller support. The virtual controls in Goblin Sword are excellent, but if you prefer the touch of a physical controller then now you have the option. If you are one of those who favor the virtual controls, you can now see the hitboxes when repositioning them in the options screen, so you can get really exact with how you want them set up. Finally, this update brings Game Center leaderboards to the Time Trial levels and offers various other tweaks and fixes throughout the game. If you like platformers and haven't picked up Goblin Sword yet, it's one of the easiest recommendations I can make, both in its initial release form but even more so thanks to this latest update.

A Closer Look at Character Beaming in the Upcoming 'Sick Bricks' Posted: 24 Feb 2015 11:00 AM PST Earlier this month, we took a look at Spin Master's Sick Bricks, a new action-adventure title with a ton of characters available to unlock. One of the coolest aspects of the game is its accompanying suite of actual physical toys that can be purchased at brick and mortar stores which can be "beamed" into the game, unlocking the character in the game. We thought we'd take a closer look at the toys themselves and how they interact with the game as we wait for its launch. As we mentioned in our hands-on, Sick Bricks allows players to "beam" real-world figurines into the game. The characters look like highly detailed LEGO mini-figs, with separate heads and bodies that can be mixed and matched. Beaming is as simple as tapping the 'Beam' button, aiming your device's camera at the actual figurine, and letting the game work its magic. When a character is beamed in, the character is unlocked permanently in the game for use. Once you unlock the character, you are free to play the character and level them up. However, when you do level up, the game asks you to basically beam the figurine into the system again in order to "unlock" the upgrade. Beaming in this instance is actually slightly more complicated as the game has you using your camera to capture the front and sides of the figure (creating an almost 3D beam). Based on what I've seen, it's probably an anti-piracy feature, but I found it pretty neat that the system can actually pull it off. Players also have the option to purchase characters within the game without needing a physical figurine, but the game's IAP governs such purchases (meaning there's a good chance you'll have to pay some kind of cash to collect multitudes of characters). While the game's freemium pricing hasn't been announced yet, I would imagine that actually purchasing the physical figurines will be competitive with IAP. There's also the fact that purchasing the physical characters unlock a few nifty beaming figures that can't be done with simply picking up the characters within the game. For one, buying multiple characters will allow you beam in 'totems' which are basically multiple characters stacked on top of each other. When you beam in a totem, you temporarily gain a super character that launches all the abilities from each of the individual characters simultaneously. It also allows you to open totem chests, which offer experience, currency and the occasion item. Some physical packs also include vehicles which can be built and then beamed into the game as well. Finally, being able to customize the heads and bodies of physical characters mean you can beam in unique combinations of stats and special moves (although you won't be able to level up your custom characters). These advantages alone seem to make actual picking up the physical figurines enticing and outweigh the minor frustration of needing to re-beam characters when they level up. From a stat standpoint, there are four attributes that can be improved upon: strength, health, agility and defense. Each character has their own individual stats as well as their own leveling structure (each character can level up to 10 and each upgrade for each level is fixed). While this does limit some of the customizability, Sick Bricks lets you view the upgrade path from the onset which lets you decide which characters have the potential stats that you'll want to upgrade. At launch, Sick Bricks will have over 40 different characters available for launch. Each has their own personality, special moves, and attribute structure. It also means that there will be plenty of variety and potential in terms of purchasing the physical toys (semi-blind packs will be sold with small windows in the plastic so you can see what you're getting). Meanwhile, expect the game as well as the physical packs to hit stores on March 12th.

TA Plays: 'Gunbrick' - A Great Puzzle Platformer from Nitrome Posted: 24 Feb 2015 10:00 AM PST Gunbrick [$2.99] came out a while ago, and while we reviewed it and discussed it a couple times on the podcast, it's really one of those games that are better to see in motion. The game mechanic revolves around rotating your Gunbrick to solve puzzles where your gun (and sometimes blast shield) are in the right location. Also, I like recording video of puzzle games because it immortalizes you looking really dumb: Gunbrick is a pretty classic iOS puzzle platformer in that it's got a price tag, no IAP, and feels like a complete game- Even if it is a little on the short side. If you haven't played Gunbrick yet, be sure to check it out.

'Card Crawl', the Playing Card Roguelike, Releases Next Month Posted: 24 Feb 2015 09:00 AM PST Back in November, we heard of an interesting card-based roguelike called Card Crawl , coming from the developer of Zuki's Quest [$0.99]. Well, the game has been in development since then, and this intriguing title finally has been finished and has a release date: March 12th. To celebrate the occasion, Tinytouchtales and Mexer have released a new trailer for the game, showing off the finalized gameplay and artwork that you'll see in the release version: The game itself is based around a deck of playing cards with four different types of things represented by the suits, with enemies, items, money, weapons, and shields appearing among the four card types. You can equip two items and keep one in your backpack, and must play 3 of the 4 cards drawn each turn. The ultimate goal is to play all the cards in the deck, with 5 of the cards being special ability cards that you buy with in-game gold. But have no fear, IAP-haters: the game will just be $1.99 without any in-app purchases once it releases on the 12th.

'Tempo' Review - Why Does This Game Exist? Posted: 24 Feb 2015 07:55 AM PST Rarely does a game make me question the reason for its very existence. Often times, the objective is clear enough. A game might want to tell a story, to thrill the player and test their reflexes, or even to just make a lot of money by capitalizing on a particular trend. But with Tempo [$3.99], I just cannot for the life of me conceive just why does this game exist? Who thought this game was a valid idea that should exist? It's not a bad idea, but it's the video game equivalent of building a bridge in the middle of a field. Sure, it can be a structurally sound and beautiful bridge, but what exactly was the point of building it in the first place? Why do I ask this about Tempo? Well, because it's a military-action game that distills down all the intense action and suspense of shooters where you're trying to rescue people, defuse bombs, and slaughter all manner of terrorists in to quick-time events. Normally, quick-time events serve as disruptions, ways for game designers to try add parts to games that they couldn't squeeze in to the core gameplay. Most often, they serve as rude distractions to the experience, an annoying compromise between gameplay and exposition. It feels unrewarding to watch someone defuse a bomb, so why not have the player press a button to do so instead? Rarely are quick-time events the most memorable parts of games. I recommend reading Tim Rogers' analysis of quick-time events for more on what they are. Don't worry, unlike many of the pieces by the loquacious writer-turned-developer, you can read this in less than a year! So, who thought that Tempo should be a game all about quick-time events? Because they make a game that should be intense and suspenseful have no excitement whatsoever. Literally everything in Tempo is done by either timing the moving of a line in a circle, or rapidly tapping, or drawing a sequence in quick order. Every interaction in the game is one of those three things. You play in short 30-60 missions, trying to beat the clock by getting 'perfects' on each event to increase the time on the clock, as failure generally means that you'll fail the mission. You don't explicitly fail unless you fail twice, but the clock will run out if you screw up once. But that's the entire game. Judged on its own merits, Tempo isn't terrible. The missions are short, so the game's great for pick-up-and-play sessions. I like that the gold medal times on each mission are legitimately difficult to get, though you often just need to wait until your cast of characters have improved-enough stats to go back to the missions and get additional time boosts to earn those golds. The game does look good, though it's definitely "generic military shooter" and needs actual iPhone 6 Plus optimization. At least there's a diverse cast of characters, it's not just a variety of slightly-different bros. It feels like Tempo was meant to be a free-to-play game once, that was eventually shifted to be a paid game. There are boosts to buy, but they can all be bought through in-game currency, of which there is only one. The cash booster isn't really worth buying as it's a risk and for a huge part of the game, is difficult to profit off of. But the other items can come in handy, especially the additional time boost. The additional miss? Not so much. You can't buy upgrades, you have to earn them by playing the game and completing more levels, which is something I at least respect. It feels like the game was really meant at one point to be free-to-play, then someone realized that it wasn't going to make any money, and they decided to cut their losses by making a paid game. It was a smart decision, I think that it wouldn't make much money as a free-to-play game. And while I can only really play so much at a time, I have the willpower to stop playing a game if I don't want to play it any more. So, Tempo is an okay game on its own merits, judged on what it is trying to be. But those merits are not what a game should be aspiring to be. Why does a game that strips out all the fun parts of action games, the action, is replacing them with boring, disconnected events? This is even a problem in Tempo - you're watching a lot of the game, and the only reason why something is handled automatically and something is of your doing is because the game decided it would be that way. This isn't a game where you handle all your actions through a system of command recognitions, this is a game where you do as someone else prompts you to do. There's a very limited internal logic going on here. Tempo is a game where you basically just watch most of the action and then provide the most cursory of responses to keep it going. I might have just described a Telltale game, you might say, but not so much. Telltale games focus on telling an engaging narrative, and letting the player influence the story through their decisions. They do provide quick-time events to justify fast-paced sequences as more than just action parts, but they're forgiven because, again, it's in service of a larger, well-written narrative. Tempo can't fall back on that. Its story is an unremarkable military scenario. The most personality it has are the British accents. Who is this game for? Is it for the person who enjoys action games but has no skill to play them at all? Maybe? I would suggest that they watch a movie instead. If you have limited skill, then play Midnight Star [Free] instead, that game does a smart job in limiting the action down to being just a shooting gallery. I think it's stylistically the equivalent of one of those fake games that appear in TV shows and movies, but at least you actually do something in it! There's a fine line between simplifying an action game and reducing it down to an absolutely pointless and inessential nothing. And that's what Tempo is: pointless. It aspires only for pointlessness and reaches those shallow goals. For what it is on its own merits, Tempo isn't awful, but what's the point of playing it? If you want a military-action game, go play Modern Combat 5 [$3.99], at least it will test your skill. Even if you're not good at first-person shooters, you have to learn somehow! Please, do something besides play Tempo! Again, not because Tempo as a product is bad, but it's a stupid game that should not exist.

'iO' Review - Growing Up Is Sometimes The Answer Posted: 24 Feb 2015 07:05 AM PST There's an inherent joy in playing around with physics. In life, some of our earliest interactions with the external world involve playing around with physics to get a feel for the rules of reality. Even as fully-grown, educated, theoretically wise adults, we still get the urge to use our coffee spoon to launch the creamer at the person sitting at the table on the other side of the restaurant, just to see if we could. For a long time, games weren't terribly good at recreating satisfying physics along with all the other bits we tend to want in a game. There just wasn't enough computing power, time, or resources in general, and it wasn't a high priority. I maintain to this day that the reason Sonic The Hedgehog hit as powerfully as it did was due more to its solid physics engine than anything else. Any old character can go fast, but Sonic not only made us work for it, but also let us see the consequences of that speed. It wouldn't be until several years later that putting realistic physics into a game became a popular thing to do, but once it did, it broke things wide open. Although just about every genre benefited to some extent from that, puzzle platformers ended up building a cottage industry around fooling around with the laws of nature. It's not surprising they've proliferated on PC, given the platform has usually had processing power to spare, but it is a bit unexpected how well they've flourished on iOS. Puzzle platformers often have notoriously slim margins of error, and touch controls that attempt to ape traditional control set-ups are themselves notoriously prone to error. I think the very best puzzle platformers on iOS have found another common thread with the classic Sonic games by having the player's character roll around. We tend to associate a certain inertia with rolling that helps cover up any lack of precision that might occur. So it is that on the App Store we have puzzle platformers starring punctuation, a naked guy on a bicycle, and other such strangeness. Well, we can now add a size-changing wheel to the mix thanks to iO [$2.99], a somewhat straightforward but still quite enjoyable rolling PC port. iO uses a lot of familiar beats. In each of the game's 150 stages, you need to safely guide your little wheel to the exit. You can move left or right using virtual buttons on the left-hand side of the screen, and you can increase or decrease your size by tapping buttons on the right. Changing your size not only affects your physical dimensions, but also changes your mass, allowing you to increase or decrease your momentum as you see fit. This ability is something I don't think I've encountered before in a puzzle-platformer on iOS, and it's a pretty neat trick. I wish that inventiveness extended to the obstacles and gimmicks the game makes use of. A well made stage is a well made stage and all, but I don't get quite as excited by the prospect of portals and gravity flips the way I used to. Nevertheless, the combination of these old and familiar elements with the novel size-changing ability makes for plenty of interesting challenges and new techniques to learn. Like most games that make heavy use of physics, there are often many ways to clear a stage in iO. I've praised this before in other games and I'll do the same here, because there's nothing quite like the feeling of cleverness you get in games when you think you've found your own special way to the goal. The game capitalizes on this by timing your run and awarding medals based on the result. Not only does it provide replay value by challenging you to beat your best time, it also allows the game to hint at unconventional ways of clearing a level. If you see a big gap between the target time for the gold and silver medal of the same stage, you know there's some kind of interesting trick to discover. The stages are just complicated enough to encourage this kind of curiosity, while still being short enough to clear in tens of seconds rather than minutes in most cases. The game offers tons of well-designed stages and has no IAP, offering up plenty of bang for the buck. If you've enjoyed any games using a similar concept before, you'll have a good enough time here. Still, I can't help but feel that iO is missing a certain something. Perhaps owing to its visual design leaning hard on a somewhat tired theme, it lacks character. New obstacles are introduced as you move from level pack to level pack, changing up the gameplay all throughout, and yet it never feels like you're making progress. It doesn't help that, as I mentioned before, all of iO's tricks are old hat for the genre. The size-changing thing is great, but once you've familiarized yourself with it, you've seen everything new the game has to offer. The combination of each of these old toys with this unusual mechanic technically produces new experiences. But instead of feeling like the game is throwing new pitches at you all the time, it comes off more like the same old routine, just with you holding a different bat. While it's lacking a certain zip that would help it stand out from the crowd, there's no question that iO is a solid game stuffed with well-designed content. The size-changing mechanic is well-exploited, forcing you to think inventively and practically if you want to score golds on all but the earliest levels. I had a lot of fun making my way through the game, and there are plenty of tough stages that might have you reaching for the included skip button. It plays nicely, and even offers up Game Center leaderboards for each and every level to give you plenty of competition to chew on. It's not going to rock your socks off with its style or innovation, but for those who enjoy playing with balls, iO has plenty to show you.

Due to Apple's Stance on Weapons, Latest 'Overkill 3' Video Features Soldiers Holding Invisible Guns Posted: 23 Feb 2015 04:32 PM PST This Thursday Craneballs Studios is unleashing Overkill 3, the latest entry in their ultra-popular shooter series, onto the world. Overkill 3 switches up the normal Overkill formula by pulling the camera back to a third-person perspective and adding in cover mechanics. The game has been soft-launched since last September and has undergone several tweaks and balances in the time since, and generally it's been well-recieved by those who were already fans of the other free to play Overkill games. With the official worldwide launch just a couple of days away, Craneballs has prepared a new trailer for Overkill 3, and given Apple's recent crusade against weapons and violence in the front-facing parts of the App Store, the developers are erring on the side of caution with this latest video. See if you can spot what's missing. Did you catch that? Nobody in the trailer was holding actual guns! It was like a crazy flashback to when I'd play pretend guns with my friends as a kid. Now, I'm not sure if this was an Apple-mandated change or if Craneballs is just being exceedingly cautious with its App Store media assets. Or perhaps it's Craneballs simply making their own statement on how silly the inconsistent rejections and rule enforcing can be in the App Store. Whatever the case, I think the video's pretty funny, and Overkill 3 is looking pretty darn good, so swing on buy late Wednesday or early Thursday to give the full official launch version a download for yourself.

'Planet Quest' Review - Feel The Heavenly Rhythm Posted: 23 Feb 2015 03:41 PM PST Rhythm video games and weird themes go together like peanut butter and jam. It doesn't seem like a natural combination by any means, but most of the best and most successful games in the genre have sported bizarre or abstract themes. That's probably owing to the genre's big break coming with Sony's Parappa The Rapper, a weird yet impossibly charming game about a cartoon dog trying to impress the love of his life, a sunflower named Sunny, learning how to drive or make a cake by rapping along to his instructors' beats. It was a great bit of sleight of hand that distracted from the game's brevity and somewhat simple nature. Like playing Simon to a beat, all you need is quick thinking, a good short-term memory, and a sense of rhythm. While the set dressing forked out in a few different directions from Parappa, the gameplay hasn't seen a great deal of change in the nearly 20 years since. Follow the cues and hit the buttons at the right time to win. Sometimes those buttons are on little plastic guitars, while other times the buttons take a more natural form as a tap on a touch screen. Like Parappa, Planet Quest [Free] has a pretty odd theme to its visuals. Also like that game, it only offers up a handful of songs, but with a great deal of variety between them in terms of speed and complexity. Its closest cousin is probably Nintendo's fantastic Rhythm Heaven series. You don't have to worry about following complex chains of different buttons. As long as you can tap to the beat, you're nine-tenths of the way there. The premise has you playing as a little green alien in a UFO above various planets. Tapping fires your beam down to the planet, sucking up whatever it touches. Your goal is to kidnap people and animals while leaving plants alone. Your ship doesn't move, but the planet rotates around as the music plays, with with the various denizens of the planet generating their own sounds on the back beat. Just tap as they travel underneath you, and you'll score some points. Get a bunch in a row to earn a multiplier, boosting your score higher. If you miss an animal or hit a plant, you'll lose some of your hearts. When you run out, your game is over. A successful zap will restore some of your hearts, so as long as you don't make too many mistakes in a row, you'll have plenty of chances to recover. After a little while, the appearance of the planet will change along with the music, setting you on the next stage, so to speak. The eight different songs simply shuffle one after another, getting a bit more complex with each pass, until you finally succumb. You'll have to reach and unlock each of them before they'll be added to the regular rotation. There's a good mix of genres covered in the tracklist, with my personal favorite being the reggae planet, and they play a little differently each time, offering up nice replay value. In addition to simply shooting for a high score, you can also try to earn various achievements, though at least one of them is going to be impossible for most people. The quality of the music is great, with catchy rhythms that go well in a game like this. You can trust yourself to tap to the beat and get a good score, something that should be a given in music games but isn't always the case. Each animal has a different sound effect, cuing you in on what's heading your way. Some animals will line up nicely with your beam while others will try to slip past quickly. Others will come up in large batches, forcing you to echo the pattern if you want to scoop them all up. The visuals are clean, colorful, and perfectly bizarre. Since the camera likes to play with zooming in and out a lot, the simplicity and clarity of the graphics are both much appreciated. There are also a few cute touches that add some personality. For example, if you graze an animal, you'll sometimes just pull their costume off, revealing a human underneath. Since you can't really take your eyes off the immediate play area to check your life meter, the game uses visual cues to help you understand more or less how well you're doing, with red flashes giving you a strong clue that you might be close to your end. The crazy thing about Planet Quest is that it's free. There's just a single IAP at the moment to remove ads, coming in at a meager $0.99. If you can manage to get to first place on the leaderboards while you're clearing those achievements, you don't even have to pay that. The game will unlock the ad-free version for you if you prove your skills to that extent. If you can't be the best in the world and don't have a dollar to spare, you can still enjoy the game fully, albeit with ads. Not a bad deal at all. There are just two things I want to mention here, not as negatives but more as important information for prospective buyers/players. First, the game requires iOS 8, so to anyone holding out for certain games to update, you'll have to sit this one out. The other point I want to mention is that the game uses a lot of a quick flashing lights in a couple of the levels, so if you are sensitive to that sort of thing, please be careful. My only real knock on Planet Quest is that it's pretty thin on options. I'd like to have another mode where I could choose the song I want to play, in particular. The music and visual themes are so great, I'd love to be able to play my favorites on a whim. What's here is well done, though, with the developer understanding how crucial it is in games like these to be able to restart quickly after failing. It's really easy to chain one game into the next, passing the time without even realizing it. I suppose I'd also like to see Game Center support with its leaderboard and achievements, though I suppose with that unlock system they have going on here, that might not be possible. If you've got even a little love for rhythm games and a device capable of playing it, you owe it to yourself to at least try Planet Quest. It doesn't cost anything to try it out, and I bet you'll throw that dollar down pretty quickly after seeing how quirky and fun this game is. The presentation is fantastic and the gameplay just works on a pure level. I think that's just about the best thing any rhythm game can aspire to, and makes for what is easily one of the best games in the genre on mobiles.

Orangepixel's 'Heroes of Loot 2' is Dead, Long Live 'Space Grunts' Posted: 23 Feb 2015 02:38 PM PST Last time we checked in on Orangepixel, the solo developer was working on a turn-based game that was tentatively titled Heroes of Loot 2 , a sequel to the action-roguelike Heroes of Loot [$1.99] that was a real-time game. The bad news is that Heroes of Loot 2 is dead. The good news is that the turn-based prototype is officially Orangepixel's next game, with its own name: Space Grunts. As confirmed on Twitter, this prototype is Orangepixel's next main project. Check out the latest video of the game: Space Grunts is turn-based, but designed like an action game with a fast pace. As the developer says on the official site: "I just don't like the slow pace, and deep statistics that comes with turn-based games." It'll be an interesting mix, but the current footage of the game shows something that could just live up to the fast speed of other Orangepixel games, while providing the benefits of turn-based games. This one's still in development, expected later in 2015, and will be coming to iOS, Android, and desktop.

Check Out the Trailer for Upcoming 100% Free Endless Runner, 'Lastronaut' Posted: 23 Feb 2015 01:31 PM PST A nifty-looking game has been shared on our forums, entitled Lastronaut. This endless runner will have you trying to make it as far as possible while blasting aliens, trying to reach the last rocket ship leaving Earth. Darn sentient machines ruined everything again! The game's promising vibrant visuals with colorful effects, a number of weapons to unlock and use, and explosions by the bucketful. Check out the game in motion: The game will be free, and that means totally free with no ads nor IAP in the game. It's being created as a "love-letter to gaming" by its developers. One of those developers is Darrin Henein, who by day works as the Lead Mobile Designer at Firefox, so at least he has a day job. I look forward to the people who will try to complain about a free game that is consciously trying to not make any money off of them, of course. The release is expected to be soon, aiming for next week on March 5th if everything works out.