Posts tagged with "game day"

Game Day: Paul Pixel - The Awakening

Paul Pixel - The Awakening by Xoron GmbH is a classic adventure game reimagined for touch. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world where alien space zombies have overrun the Earth. I felt like a change of pace this week and when I saw Paul Pixel, the combination of retro game art and zombies caught my eye. By and large the game delivers with a fun story, great artwork, chiptunes, and wry sense of humor, though it is fairly short and not difficult.

The story opens with zombies emerging from a spaceship before cutting to Paul Pixel’s home where the game begins. The first order of business is to escape the zombie-infested city, but ultimately, Paul must save the world. The mechanics of Paul Pixel are simple - tap where you want Paul to walk, tap things you want him to interact with or pick up, and tap a hand icon in the corner of the game to access your inventory.

In classic adventure game style, all of the dialogue in Paul Pixel is text-based. The dialogue is kept relatively short in most cases, with a touch of humor that helps to keep the text from getting tedious. If you tap a character and get the same interaction a second time though, it would be nice if there was a way to skip through the text more quickly.

The colorful pixel art of Paul Pixel is the handiwork of artist Paul Veer and adds a lot to the experience of the game. Because the pace of the game is relaxed, I enjoyed sitting back to absorb the vibrant colors and surprising detail of each scene. The soundtrack to Paul Pixel is solid too. In a fitting touch, all of the music was composed on an original Commodore C64 SID.

Paul Pixel does a great job of capturing the vibe of old-school adventure games, but with updated artwork and gameplay designed for touch. The release notes are up front about the fact that the game will only take 2.5 - 3 hours to play. Paul Pixel is also not that difficult, which may make this game a non-starter for some, but I have found that on balance, the story, humor, artwork, and soundtrack more than make up for its shortcomings.

According to the developers a Mac and Apple TV version of Paul Pixel will likely be made too, with the Apple TV version bundled with the iOS game at no additional cost. I can’t wait to see Paul Pixel on tvOS. The vivid artwork and chiptunes feel like they would be great on a TV and the simple game mechanics should work well with the Siri Remote.

Paul Pixel - The Awakening is available on the App Store for $1.99.

Game Day: Rubek

This week I’ve been playing a great-looking, tough puzzle game called Rubek from Xigma Games. As the name suggests, it’s a game involving colored cubes. Rubek is played from a three-quarters perspective, similar to Monument Valley. You guide a white cube along a path through each puzzle to the final goal by swiping on the screen to roll the cube.

The path you take is segmented into squares of different colors, including some with a small plus symbol in the center. Roll onto a colored square with a plus and the side of your cube the lands on that square changes to that color. This is where the game gets tough. You can roll any side of your cube across a dark grey square, but if you try to roll across a colored square along the path, the side of your cube that touches the square must match its color. The combination of color matching while accounting for where the six sides of your cube will land gets hard fast.

Your score is determined based on the number of moves necessary to complete the puzzle. At the end of each level you get a star rating based on how many moves it took you to finish the level. Rubek has over 75 levels in total, which add new mechanics as you progress like trigger blocks that modify the puzzle’s map when you roll over them, keeping the game fresh as you play through the levels.

Rubek’s settings let you turn off sounds and include a color-blind option that lets you adjust the color scheme used in the game. I’ve spent the last couple of months trying lots of different kinds of iOS games and found some great ones, but it’s nice to get back to a puzzle game, which is one of my favorite genres of all. Rubek is the sort of game you can play for 5 minutes or an hour depending on how much time you have, which I always appreciate, and it’s challenging without being frustrating. If you enjoy multidimensional puzzle games, Rubek is worth a try.

Rubek is available on the App Store for $1.99.

Game Day: Nightgate

In Nightgate, by Semidome, you navigate a glowing sphere through a grid of 3D geometric shapes guided by another sphere. This is where I suspect some people might stop me and ask ‘Didn’t you review this game last week?’ No, but I wouldn’t blame you if you mistook Nightgate for Gemini at first glance. There are some superficial similarities, but the two games are very distinct.

Nightgate is a follow up to Semidome’s Last Voyage, which was among Apple’s Best of 2015. The game features 50 levels of puzzles. The goal of each puzzle is roughly the same – guide your sphere through a maze of obstacles by dragging your finger anywhere on the screen to move over specific spots identified by dots surrounded by a circle. After you have flown over each node your companion sphere takes you to the next stage of the game.

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Game Day: Gemini

Some games are as much about art and the experience they create as they are about gameplay. Monument Valley comes to mind for instance. Gemini – A Journey of Two Stars is a beautiful new game from Echostone Games that falls into the same category and succeeds by being simultaneously stunning and engrossing.

As you start Gemini, two stars have fallen from the sky. You play as the larger star. There are no instructions or tutorials, just subtle visual hints about what you are supposed to do. Tapping the left and right sides of the screen guides your star in those directions.

As you approach the smaller star, the two interact and begin to rise. Get too far away from the smaller star and both start to fall from the sky. This makes for an interesting tension as you try to stay close to the smaller star, which can have a mind of its own, while also completing the game’s tasks.

As you rise through a gorgeous abstract landscape, the sky darkens. If it gets too dark, your stars will fall. To avoid that you need to light beacons by steering your star over them. Lighting up the sky has the added advantage of revealing more of your surroundings. The stunning artwork of Gemini is paired with an equally impressive and soothing soundtrack that sets the tone for the game.

As you lose yourself in Gemini, the game is more about the interaction of the stars than anything else. The dance between the stars and making sure you bring the little star along become the focus. This is a very different game, but the feeling of a connection with the small star that Gemini created as I played reminded me a lot of playing Journey last Summer on my PS4.

Gemini is relatively short. The six stages of the game should take most people no more than 1-2 hours to complete. If you evaluate games by the numbers of levels per dollar you spend, you may be disappointed with Gemini, but as a piece of interactive art, I suspect many people, myself included, will return to Gemini over and over just to enjoy the visuals and soundtrack.

Gemini is available on the App Store at an introductory price of $2.99.

Game Day: Legend of the Skyfish

Legend of the Skyfish by Crescent Moon Games is an action-puzzle game that evokes Nintendo’s Zelda franchise, but has its own unique twist that will reel you in. Legend revolves around the tale of the Skyfish, an evil creature from deep below the ocean’s surface that was awoken by the greed of fishermen. Skyfish took over the surface world and enslaved its people. You play as a girl who was saved by the Moonwhale and is in search of her little brother.

As the protagonist of the story, your main tool and weapon is a fishing pole. Whether it’s navigating the map, avoiding barriers, or defeating enemies, you can accomplish it all with your fishing pole. Fend off the attacks of mutant sea-people that roam the surface world by swinging your pole like a sword. Jump from island to island or move objects by casting your fishing line to hook special points on the map. Catch enemies and pull them into spikes and other obstacles with your fishing pole as an alternative to hand-to-hand combat. More than any other element, the creative uses to which you can put your fishing pole set Legend apart from other games.

Legend eases you into the game with several fairly easy levels in the first of three worlds, but does a nice job of getting progressively more difficult and imaginative with its puzzles. You move around the island world by dragging your finger in the direction you want to go. There are also two game pads. The first swings your pole like a sword. The second game pad casts a line from the fishing pole. By tapping the pad and shifting your finger, you aim the pole. Raising your finger launches your fishing line.

One thing that is sorely lacking from Legend is progress syncing. The game is available on iPhone, iPad, and the Apple TV, but there is no way to pick up where you left off across devices. I played on my iPad more than my iPhone, but both worked equally well. Touch is well-suited to aiming the fishing line. I played a few levels on the Apple TV too. Legend’s world looks gorgeous on a big screen, but I liked using the touch interface on iOS devices better than the Siri Remote’s tiny touch surface.

Legend has two things that help it transcend Zelda copy-cat status. The first is the clever fishing pole gameplay, which is unique and thoughtfully implemented. The second is enemies’ vulnerability to the game’s environment. Both aspects of Legend add a depth and novelty to navigating the colorful water-world and to combat that keeps the game fresh and fun throughout.

Legend of the Skyfish is available on the App Store for $3.99.

Game Day: Linia

Linia from Black Robot Games is fiendishly difficult, but strangely relaxing in its complexity. The challenge is to draw a straight line through a series of colored shapes that intersects the shapes in the order of the color sequence at the top of the screen. Here’s the thing though, the shapes are moving, rotating, shrinking, growing, and changing color all at once. The movement follows a regular pattern, but it gets complicated fast.

Linia is a creature of the post-iOS 7 design aesthetic. Each of its 80 levels is composed of brightly-colored geometric flat shapes. What’s ingenious about Linia and makes it particularly difficult is that it requires pattern matching, careful timing, and quick reflexes simultaneously. As you draw a line it appears white but fills in behind where you started in red, which is part of the timing element. You have to lift your finger to commit to your line before it turns completely red. If you wait to long, you’ll have to start drawing your line all over, but if you release at the wrong time, you may be unable to hit the right color sequences.

I’ve played Linia on both my iPhone 6s Plus using my finger and on my 12.9 inch iPad Pro using the Apple Pencil. I give a slight edge to using the Pencil to play Linia on the iPad because you can draw such a precise line, but the difference between playing on the iPad and iPhone was much less than I expected.

The soundtrack that accompanies Linia plays a big role in minimizing the frustration of some of the harder puzzles. There’s something inviting about the electronic vibe of the soundtrack that feels like it’s encouraging you to stay a while to keep trying to beat even the hardest puzzles.

Black Robot has done a great job bringing something fresh and clever to the crowded puzzle genre on iOS. It’s especially impressive given that this is Black Robot’s first iOS game. With such a great start, I look forward to seeing what else Black Robot comes up with in the future.

Linia is available on the App Store for $1.99.

Game Day: Reigns

Have you ever wanted to rule your own kingdom? Of course you have. With Reigns you can do just that – while you stand in line to buy groceries. Reigns, an Apple Editor’s Choice, is a card-based adventure game with an clever interaction model. Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer liken Reigns to Tinder, which I get, but it’s also a little unfair because it ignores the depth and personality of the game that underlies the Tinder-like mechanics.

As king, you are presented with a series of decisions in the form of cards that are brought to you by advisors and other characters. Each decision has only two options that you choose between by swiping left or right – hence the comparison to Tinder. But there’s much more to Reigns than just flicking cards. Every choice you make has consequences, some of which affect future generations, and it’s not unusual for a decision to spin out of control quickly ending in your death.

Each choice you make also has an impact on the strength of the church, your subjects, the army, and your finances, which are tracked at the top of the screen. As you play, you can swipe cards part way to the left or right to get a hint of which metrics will be affected by your choices. To survive, you must carefully balance each variable. Allow one category to get too high or too low and your reign will end badly.

All reigns end eventually, but each time one does, you are reborn as a new king and given a series of goals like “Lose yourself in the dungeon,’ ‘Meet the devil,’ or ‘Try the blue one.’ Meeting goals unlocks cards and new aspects of the game keeping it fresh. There are also mini-games like dice and dueling scattered throughout Reigns.

Reigns is perfect for mobile, though it is also available on the Mac via Steam. Swiping left and right to make decisions about your kingdom is quick and easy wherever you are. The combination of the number of cards, consequences that span generations, and need to balance multiple statistics adds an interesting level of strategy. But above all else, what has endeared Reigns to me most is that the artwork and questions are imbued with a sense of humor that gives Reigns a unique personality unlike any iOS game I have played recently.

Reigns is available on the App Store for $2.99.

Game Day: Severed

Severed is a dungeon adventure game for iOS from DrinkBox Studios that originally debuted on the PS Vita and will be available later this Summer on the Wii U and 3DS. The game tells the story of a one-armed warrior named Sasha in search of her family in a strange world populated by monstrous creatures.

The move to bring Severed to iOS is a new beginning for DrinkBox Studios, which published its prior mobile titles on PS Vita. But with the Vita in decline, DrinkBox has moved on. In an interview with Engadget, the Toronto-based company announced that it is finished with the Vita. That’s a shame because I love my PS Vita and DrinkBox’s Guacamelee! was one of my favorite Vita games, but Sony’s loss is Apple’s gain.

Severed, described by its creators as an RPG-light adventure, is a visually arresting journey through a bizzare landscape. The unique artwork style will be immediately recognizable to anyone who has played Guacamelee!, while still creating an atmosphere and look of its own. Sasha, the main character, has just one weapon, a sword given to her by a mysterious figure at the outset of her quest. As you encounter enemies, you attack with slashing touch gestures reminiscent of Fruit Ninja and block counterattacks by swiping along the course of incoming blows. Early in the game you are confronted by single enemies. Things get more complicated as you advance and have to defeat multiple foes that are better at defending themselves.

But there’s more to Severed than just frantic slashing. There’s a strategic element too. During the course of a battle, Sasha’s ‘focus bar’ slowly fills. Kill an opponent when Sasha’s focus bar is full and you can sever its limbs. It sounds more gruesome than it actually is. Collect enough limbs and you can trade them for armor, equipment, and other upgrades. As a result, it doesn’t pay to simply kill a monster as fast as possible, which adds depth to the battles.

There are two levels of play – ‘casual’ and ‘standard.’ Severed can be intense and absorbing in standard mode, which makes casual mode a nice option if you would rather play a more relaxed game, soaking in the visuals and soundtrack.

The touch-based gestures of Severed are outstanding on iOS. The game is a Universal app, so you can play it on an iPhone or iPad, but it really shines on the iPad, especially an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. Suddenly, that Apple Pencil that you may use to take notes or sketch becomes Sasha’s sword. Using the Apple Pencil this way adds immeasurably to the fun.

I’ll be playing Severed a lot more as I sit by the shore of Lake Michigan for a mini-vacation this weekend. Severed is expensive as iOS games go, but at less than half the price you’d pay for the PS Vita version, you get a game that fits with the iPhone and iPad hardware in a way that it can’t on the Vita. Sure, the Vita has a touch surface, but it’s still designed primarily for button-based games, while the large touch surfaces of iOS devices make it easier to get lost in Severed’s action and story.

Severed is available on the App Store for $6.99.

Game Day: Bulb Boy

Bulb Boy is a bizarre point-and-tap puzzle adventure on iOS from Kraków, Poland-based Bulbware that draws inspiration from games like Machinarium. As the name suggests, the story centers around a boy who is a lightbulb. Bulb Boy appears to be going about his business, living a quiet life with his grandfather and bulb-dog in their bulb-house, until strange things suddenly start to happen. Bulb Boy’s world is beset with monsters and it’s up to you, as Bulb Boy, to defeat them by collecting a series of items that help you solve puzzles.

Everything in the game is black and green like an old CRT monitor. The animation has a distinctly retro feel too. When I started Bulb Boy I immediately felt like I had stepped into a demented version of an old cartoon from the 1930s.

The mechanics are straight-forward. You explore each scene by tapping the screen. Bulb Boy moves to where you tap and examines any items in the area. The items you collect help you solve the puzzles and move on to the next stage. In addition, Bulb Boy can take off his head to illuminate dark areas and help solve puzzles. As the game progresses it continually introduces new challenges that keep the game fresh.

Bulb Boy, which has won more awards than I can list here, is as creepy and weird as it sounds. Originally released for PCs on Steam, the game translates well to iOS’s touch interface. I played on my iPhone 6s Plus and iPad Pro and greatly preferred the experience on the iPad, where the artwork and soundtrack could really shine.

Bulb Boy is as much about exploring and enjoying its strange world as it is about the puzzles. The lead character is so charming that I very quickly found myself wanting to help him out of all the tight spots he finds himself in, which makes for an absorbing game. For the most part, the puzzles are challenging without being too hard, but if you do get stuck, Bulb Boy provides hints in the form of pictographic thought-bubbles that appear above Bulb Boy’s head. There are also walk-throughs online.

Bulb Boy is available on the App Store for $2.99 and, although I have not tried it, it’s worth noting that Bulb Boy is also available on the Mac for $9.99.