1st Impressions

Zamby is a $0.99 game that I really wanted to like, but couldn’t quite get into. I am not sure why. I think the graphics of the splash screen and the depth if the back-story and game rules had me expecting more from the graphics of the game levels themselves.

Zamby reminds me a bit if Sokoban with a hint of a top-view platform game, all set in a fantasy theme. Your goal is to go around and collect as many gems as possible. This requires pushing boxes out of your way, creating bridges, defending yourself from wizards (by putting/keeping stuff between you and them), and collecting and strategically placing bombs.

A free lite version comes with a starter pack if levels that act as tutorials. When you purchase the $0.99 version, you get the first of three aditional packs of 30 levels added to that. These additional level packs are in-app purchases for $0.99 each. What thus allows you to do though is get the free version, read through all the back story and help, and then play through the first ten tutorial levels. If you like what you see, $1 gets you the next pack. It is a nice marketing strategy that I wish others would follow.

If the rules engine is more important to you than retro-style graphiscs, then you will probably like this game. If you are more into eye candy, you may give it a pass. Either way, it isn’t going to cost you anything to take it for a spin.

If you are a fan of physics or those laser pointing games, you owe it to yourself to give Optia a try.  Unlike other laser games I’ve tried, this one adds some twists to really make things interesting.  Besides having regular mirrors like some other games, it adds one-way mirrors that you can shoot through from one direction but reflect with the other, “gems” that will split your beam into two, and the 100 levels get increasingly harder as you go through them.

There is not a lot of description necessary for “reflect the light to hit all the targets” that need to be covered.  The rules are just that simple.  Successfully implementing them though the wide array of levels is a challenge though.

This $1.99 game has a free lite version if you want to check out the concept.  And I really recommend that you do that.  My only suggestions would be the addition of OpenFeint leader boards that utilize time-based scoring for each level, and the ability for users to create and contribute levels.  I think this inter-activity would add a lot to a game that already excels in this genre.

A while back, I reviewed these games.  Unfortunately though, the posts have somehow disappeared.  The recent move of the blog and changing of the perma-links might have something to do with it.  Regardless of why they are gone though, it is a perfect excuse to revisit these incredible titles and highlight some of the changes and updates in them.

Sentinel, at it’s core, is one of the best Tower Defense games out there.  Set in a sci-fi “Mars Defense” theme, the graphics will blow you away.  Prior to playing Sentinel, I thought that Fieldrunners was probably the best TD game for the iPhone.  As soon as I launched Sentinel though, I was immediately re-thinking that idea.  This impression was not just because of the quality of the graphics, but of how the graphics actually work into the game play to give it almost a 3-D effect.  For example, your enemies may have to run a gauntlet between buildings and you can place your towers on those buildings to fire “down” into the path that the enemy is forced to use.  From a programmer standpoint, I realize that this is not much more than any other forced TD enemy path, but the implementation makes it seem much more than that because the landscape plays a more visual part of your strategy.  Instead of a typical enemy path being seen as a limitation to them, it flips that idea so that terrain comes across as something you can use to your advantage.    This terrain feature is enhanced with the addition of temporary barriers that the enemy can eventually tear down and get through.

Sentinel  allows you to defend your base in typical TD fashion with five tower types against four enemy types with three different terrain maps and two different modes of play, but comes with a bit of a real-time strategy feel to it as well because you can also harvest resources and create robot droids to repair your towers.  These additional features make this $0.99 game (originally priced at $4.99 and worth it) a real competitor to the $2.99 Fieldrunners.  And, if you watch for it on AppShopper.com, the developers even drop the price to free on occasion!

Sentinel 2 brings the same look and feel and great graphics down to earth in a “Earth Defense” theme.  But the Origin8 developers didn’t just create the same game with different graphics.  This $2.99 sequel improves on Sentinel with additional OpenFeint features (location based leader boards), further RTS-like features of attack drones and additional harvest drones, and special weapons that can be fired from space once enough energy is harvested from the playing field.  There is also a new booster tower that can be strategically placed to “boost” the effects of your other towers.  And, in addition to upgrading your placed towers, you can also upgrade your ship from which the towers and such are deployed.

The timeline of the game really ties into the first title.  In this game, your “Mars Defense” has failed and the enemy has set it’s sights on Earth.  The game offers four different “locations” on earth that serve as different playing maps, and four different levels of difficulty.  This will, guaranteed, provide any experienced TD player with enough to challenge the very best of their efforts.  Both endurance mode and mission mode (with 10 pre-defined missions) are available as well.  And, because this title builds on both the original Sentinel story line and technology, I’d recommend starting with Sentinel until you get the basics down and then progress to the further depth that Sentinel 2 has to offer.

If you enjoy quality games of this type, you also need to check out the new release, Space Station: Frontier, by the same developers.  All three truly take the Tower Defense genre to whole new levels and, along with Chillingo’s Defender Chronicles, probably offer the best this genre has to offer on the iPhone platform.  Needless to say, both of these titles make it to my Must-Have category.

Space Station: Frontier is new favorite of mine. At $2.99 in the app store, this game is a mixture of tower defense and real time strategy games. Playing it reminds me a bit of game elements of those tower building games (with goo or coconuts or whatever), SimCity, and a RTS game like Warfare Inc. Basicallt, the developers have created a real winner if a game by combining some great elements if other winners.

Created by the same group that brought us the Sentinel TD games, the game is set up as a space station. Your goal is to not only defend your station against attackers, but also expand it within reach of the resources that you need to collect. The ten campagns start out with lots of help to get you started with the basics of both construction and defense. As you complete goals, credits you earn can be spent in the store for improvements. And these credits can be spent across different campaigns and game modes. As you complete campaigns, two additional game modes become unlocked.

Your game play is not over when you complete the ten campaigns. Game modes that allow for endless play and competition on OpenFeint leader boards exist to make certain that you never run out of game play. The two endless modes do not have the specific goals of the campaigns, but rather focus on either survival or mining. The longer you last before destruction or the more you can mine before destruction, the higher your can rise in the leader boards.

I found Space Station: Frontier to provide a unique blend of some favorite game genres and it makes my Must-Have list. That being said, I would like to offer some suggestions. First, some additional campaigns would be nice. I would also like to see the additional game modes to be unlocked earlier. These are small things though and there is no reason to not download either the lite or full version and take it for a spin.

Marbles Tower Defense is one of the better TD games that I have played. In games like FieldRunners, your enemy’s health deteriorates as you shoot at them. In this case though, marbles are the enemy and they change colors as they diminish in strength. In all, there are nine different marble types, and the strangest types require the strongest towers in order to defeat.

The marbles roll down one of eight designed tracks, so no free-form open-field type options are available. Each level has three different difficulty levels. Different colored stars indicate which tracks you have completed the 49-rounds on in each difficulty level.

Not only are there eight unique towers with multiple upgrade options available, but you can also utilize spike strips, oil patches, and grenades to slow the progress of the marbles. New items can be placed both during and in-between each of the rounds. Doing this between rounds is made easier with the manual starting of each round. I also like the feature to turn the game’s sound off and listen to my own iTunes tracks during game play.

Other than additional tracks, it would be nice if there was an option to calculate some kind of scoring based on how long a track/level took to complete and how much money you have left. Ability to then post these to OpenFeint, Twitter, and/or Facebook would be cool as well. Finally, I would love an option to replace the start button with a pause button once play starts and have it automatically start up each round with possibly a little status window showing how many rounds completed and to go.

At $0.99, this game is highly recommended to those that like the TD genre. I’d give it 4.5 stars out of 5.

Aztec Quest is another casual physics puzzle. Each level has a set number of pieces to be played and a playing board with opennings that will accept the right parts in the right places. Having pre-defined locations can be both a plus and a minus though. The game comes with 50 built-in levels for $0.99, but also has a built-in editor to allow you to create and share your levels and download those shared by others.  This offers considerable game play for a buck.  A free version is available as well.  As I can’t think of a single thing I’d do to change this app, this review will be fairly short.  That is just as well though.  I have some levels to beat!

Collider is, at it’s core, a casual physics puzzle. The goal of the 56 included levels is to make all the positive and negative particles on the level to pair up and disappear. When they collide, they cancel each other out and vanish. The first levels are very simple to show you the basics in a tutorial fashion. They don’t stay that way though. They get increasingly complex.

The graphics are surpurb, the physics life-like, and the dynamically generated music really combine to produce a game well worth the $0.99 price tag (a free lite version is available as well). The developer isn’t just sitting on his laurels though. An update is coming with 20% more levels (bringing the total to 70) and a new sensor type that will literally turn everything on it’s head.

While this game, unlike most, will make my Must-Have list and stick around on my iPhone, I do have some suggestions. I would love to see different player profiles, volume adjustment for effects and music, OpenFeint leaderboards by level, and the ability to create and share levels.

Overall, this is a really nice little game from the developer of another of my all-time favorites, Block Drop. If you like puzzle games, I highly recommend both. They promise hours and hours of fun at an excellent price.

I remember as a kid having those plastic puzzles where you slid the pieces up and down and all around until you got them in the right order.  It could be numbers, letters, or if you were real lucky, a nice picture. While it has been years since I held one of them in my hands, electronic versions of the sliding puzzle games are now relevant on the PC as well as on mobile devices such as the iPhone.

If you were to swap a picture with a physics based theme then you would have the beginnings of an idea of what to expect with the game Cogs. That is because the game Cogs does not limit itself to two dimensions but to three.  By wrapping the puzzle around multiple sides of a cube then you end up with a 3D puzzle that adds an extra dimension of difficulty when it comes to solving the puzzle.

The physics portion of the game involves solving each particular puzzle using gears, pipes, balloons, and much more. The game not only contains 50 puzzles for the low low price of $0.99 but you can also purchase additional puzzles in batches of 10 from within the game.  The puzzles start out easy enough and additional levels are unlocked as you progress and gain experience.

The game is played in an Inventor mode where you gain points based on the number of moves and the amount of time used to solve each puzzle as well as a Time Challenge mode where you are given only 30 seconds to solve each puzzle and a Move Challenge mode where you must attempt to solve the puzzle in 10 moves or less.  The levels in the latter two modes are unlocked by completing them first in the Inventor mode.

While all this might sound challenging (and it is…), the best part of the game is the absolutely gorgeous graphics which are accompanied by a beautiful sound track as well. Once you start the game it is hard to put down because not only do the levels get more and more challenging but the  graphics are so beautiful and the animations so fluid that it easily makes my top ten list of must have games to keep on my iPhone.  The only thing more surprising than the quality of the game is the incredible deal.  I struggle to think of a better game that you can get for less than a buck.

Puzzle fans are going to be losing a lot of sleep in the near future?  Why?  Blame it on the new Chillingo game, Cogs, that is making it’s way into the app store.  Expect a full review when it comes out, but the concept is to take those 5,000 sliding puzzle games in the App Store and make them totally obsolete by adding physics, pipes, gears, and so forth and taking it all into a new dimension: 3D.

Two new games have hit the App store recently that follow in the genre of those parking lot puzzles or traffic puzzles where you attempt to move the pieces around until you free a designated one. In this case, the designated one is appropriatly identified as the Blue Block. The clean interface of the game is due in large part to the lack of concentration on different kinds and/colors of vehicles. This game offers a simple GUI and graphics that do not distract from the goal at hand.  It makes up for that typical eye-candy with a massive puzzle database. When I say massive, I mean to convey an almost limitless supply.

Blue Blocks is currently free and contains a virtually endless number of levels (literally tens of thousands) starting with kiddy difficulty levels and immediate levels and going up. Virtual endless game play at a current price of zero should be a no brainer… ButWait!!!!  There’s More!!!

Not to be satisfied with the free Blue Block game, the developers took a common genre and stepped it up a notch. They added an additional blue block. This makes any given level twice as difficult. The almost 4,500 games in this pack are devided between medium, hard, and expert difficulties. If you want something at the kiddie or easy level, go back to the free game.  The difficulty levels seem well set. My attempt at the very first level ended me finishing with close to twice as many moves as it could have been done by a master at these. I learned real quick that I am no master. LOL

The game interface is simple.  Pieces slide with the swipe of a finger just as you would expect.  The status bar across the top displays your chosen difficulty level, the puzzle level you are working on, the number of moves you should be able to complete it in, and, in my case above, the fact that it took me almost twice that to complete it.  Once a level is complete, you can choose to re-play it and try to better your score or to move on to the next level.

I do have a few suggestions for the game(s).  First, I like it when a game has multiple player profiles.  My iPhone is the only one in the house and more than one person plays games on it.  Second, while I would not like a timer to stress me while I played the game, it would be nice if the level selection screen that showed how many moves a complete level took also displayed the time it took you.  Where this could really benefit is if the game added an online leader board that showed a score calculation based on your speed and a percentage of par.  Ability to optionally post these scores to Twitter and/or Facebook as some other games allow would not only allow for a bit of bragging, but also drive some attention to the game.  Finally, I would love to be able to move a piece, change my mind, and move it back without it counting as a move.  My scores are going to be plenty high as it is without my fat-finger mistakes adding to it.

Overall, I’d give this pair of games a solid 10 out of 10.  They make my Must Have list and have replaced any of the competing products on my iPhone.  Close to 40,000 combined levels for a total price of $0.99 is an incredible bargain.  If you want to try the double-block harder levels without the $0.99 expense, there is even a lite version that offers 50 puzzles for you to try.  My recommendation is to skip that though and grab Blue Block while it is free and Blue Block Double while developer still has it at a $0.99 price.  It’s worth a lot more.