1st Impressions

Sentinel 3 is the latest in the Sentinel series by Origin 8.  I posted an updated review of the first two titles in this series several months ago.  If you are unfamiliar with those titles, I suggest you check out that review as this sequel builds upon all that those offer and adds more.  To check out a teaser, see this YouTube clip.

In Sentinel 1, the goal was to protect Mars.  Sentinel 2 added ship-based weapon systems in an earth defense.  The graphics, game features, and overall game play made these two titles my favorites in one of my favorite genres of game.  The new version reminds me of the movie Starship Troopers.  Not only are the graphics movie-quality, but this time we are taking the battle to the enemy bug homeworld!

The latest installment of this award-winning series doesn’t just change venue though.  In this version, you add to the capabilities of the prior releases with not only new weapons, but a new weapon locker system where you choose which combination of weapons you are going to have available to you on a particular mission.  These new systems, combined with improvements and additions to the systems you are familiar with from the first two titles, are balanced with even more difficult enemies though.

There are a few distinct things that set this series apart from any other straight tower-defense game.  I refer to it that way because another favorite of mine, Defender Chronicles, is also head and shoulders above a crowded field of competition but does so by adding heroes and RTS type of game play into a unique side-view graphic theme.  The Sentinel series is more of a purist though in its approach to the TD genre and excels by simply providing a superior product.  Here are some of the features that set this series, and ultimately this title in particular, apart from its attempted competition:

• Use of landscape and obstacles to your advantage
• Use of drones for harvesting resources and repair
• Use of both land-based and space-based weapon systems
• Use of “boosters” that increase effectiveness of other systems
• Use of a new weapons locker system allowing you to try out different weapon combinations on a level
• Use of earned credits to not only purchase upgrades, but new abilities as well
• Use of full retina display
• Use of both OpenFeint and GameCenter to not only share scores, but level strategies

My one suggestion for this game is that it would allow you to set up multiple player profiles.  When you only have one iPhone in the house and more than one family member addicted to this title, it would be nice to keep the scores and achievements apart.

The Sentinel series of games, along with Space Station Frontier by the same developers, are a definite must-have in my book.  Because there is so much to Sentinel 3 though, I seriously recommend that you begin with the first two titles in the series in order to have a slower introduction into all that this title has to offer.  Once you are ready to graduate to Sentinel 3, its 20 campaign levels, 14 endless maps, and 20 different turrets, ship weapons, and drones will guarantee you hours of fun.  Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2 are available for $0.99 (as is Space Station: Frontier) and are a real bargain at that price.  Sentinel 3 is priced at $2.99.  That is a sale price and the title will soon go up in price.  My advice is to grab all four of these Origen 8 titles now.  You won’t be disappointed.

Crystal Portal 2, as I will abbreviate the title, is more than your average hidden object game.  As a sequel to a release that I had not played yet, I was expecting something along the lines of find X number of items on a screen only to be taken to the next screen and repeat the process.  Frankly, those don’t hold my attention too long.

Crystal Portal 2 has more to it though.  It has a little bit of a puzzle aspect to it as your goal is to locate “containers” on the screen (they are highlighted and easy to spot).  Once you select them, you are presented with a wheel that shows one item at a time that you need to locate to place in the container.  Once you complete the wheel, solving the puzzle generally causes something else to occur.  In this sense, the game has a bit more of a linear adventure feel to it.  But it isn’t linear in any kind of boring way.  You see, the containers also contain the occasional mini-game that must be completed or items needed elsewhere, and there are also these “key items” that popup little challenges.  As game play continues, you also have situations where you have to revisit one location to complete something in another.  The spokes that are found to complete a “wheel” puzzle in one location, for example, result in a completed wheel that is used in another location to unlock a totally different third location.

The game is comprised of 34 levels across 8 different locations and has a more relaxing casual game mode as well as a more challenging and timed advanced mode.  The retina-level graphics on this 75MB game are impressive.  The music is very rich sounding as well and adds a lot to the game.  While the first episode in this series is available for $2.99, this sequel is priced at $4.99.

The game controls are very intuitive.  You can pinch to zoom in or out and tap an item to pick it up or drag it to puzzle you are trying to complete.  Hints are available, as well as in-game direction in the way of notes  that can be turned on when you start the game.  My biggest issue the game had to do with the controls.  My old eyes often required me zooming into a part of the screen to find things.  Once I grabbed them though, the screen would not scroll to the puzzle as I “drug” the item to the side of the screen.  I wish the screen would scroll as you did that.

This is another great release from the G5 Entertainment folks and I can recommend it to anyone that is a fan of this genre.

Nothing beats hunting through the Apple Store and finding a really great game. Sure, every now and then you slam into a dud but sometimes you come across an Angry Birds or, in this case, Cut The Rope. The graphics are cute and the sound effects are adorable leaving you with a promise of an enjoyable experience.

And it delivers. Nothing is as addictive as working through a puzzle game which employs ropes, bubbles, air-blowing machines and spiders—and that’s just the first two worlds. The game play is pretty intuitive but what just takes the cake is that the game also makes use of the multi-touch engine so that sometimes you need to cut ropes simultaneously to make sure your puzzle is solved. Add to this the added tenseness of some of the prizes with a timer on them, you’ll find your gameplay, occasionally, pretty nerve-wracking.

But it’s totally worth it when you’ve actually managed to miss the spikes, grab the stars, blow past the danger and finally drop the candy into the waiting hungry mouth. Awesome.

Cut The Rope is available for $0.99 on both the iPhone and iPad.  A free “lite” version is also available for both platforms.  The just released 1.1 update adds a “cosmic box” of 25 additional levels set in a spaceship theme with anti-gravity devices.  This must-have title just keeps getting better and better and justifies the over 3-million downloads to date.

[written by guest contributor Rey Reynoso]

Doodle Invasion is a fun little doodle game.  It is priced at a reasonable $0.99 (a dollar more for the iPad version) and has a light version available for free.  Your goal is to save the beach at the bottom of the screen from being overtaken by the green blobs floating down in that direction.  A lot of this is done with drawing a “breaker” and getting the blobs to the fishing boats that are coming by.  You also have a helicopter that comes by occasionally and you can use it to shoot at the alien ship.

All of this isn’t as easy as it sounds though.  You not only have a mother ship to worry about, but things like  Squidipus (or would that be “squidipi”?), Lochnoodles, and Squidoodles that are working against you.

When you see “doodle” titles, they tend to be pretty simple.  There is a lot to this game though.  Every time I turned around, there was a new element, often a bit humorous, being added into the mix.  I almost wished that it was a bit slower to introduce things or had an option that was almost like difficulty levels where you could control how fast different elements were introduced.

That is about the only suggestion I can offer for this game though.  It has enough complexity and different aspects to it that it will provide the player at any level with an adequate level of challenge.

History of the World is a $1.99 game in the app store.  In short, you tap on asteroids headed to your evolving planet in order to keep it safe.  The older your planet gets, the more developed it gets and the more points you obtain.  The game also has aliens that show up occasionally and you can let them land or destroy them as well.  The game also has three different difficulty levels, from the fairly easy to the really insane.  You can also share your scores as you reach different achievement levels via either Twitter or Facebook.

My one big suggestion for the game is to have an option to stop those popup breaking news alerts whenever you reach different levels of evolution.  I find them more distracting than informative.

Game play is very simple.  As such, I’d have an easier time recommending the game at a $0.99 price instead of the $1.99 price.  It isn’t a bad game, but I didn’t find it as entertaining as I do a lot of other games that are priced at half as much.

Agents was a pleasant surprise for me.  There was a lot of depth there that I didn’t expect.  In a Spy Versus Spy genre that I haven’t seen before, this game involves trying to avoid the other spy’s booby-traps, laying out your own, and trying to do both of these things while in search of important hidden documents.

The graphics and game controls are very nice.  Set in three different types of environments, you intuitively move from one area of a room to another by tapping where you want to go or what you want to search.  A really nice feature of it though is that you can rotate the rooms around and view them from any direction.  When you get close to a wall that might block your point of view, the wall fades away so that you see through it.

As you walk from room to room, you find area that sparkle.  These are areas that you have not explored yet.  By tapping on them, you examine them.  Sometimes, there is nothing there.  Sometimes, you find weapons or ammo for them.  And sometimes, if you are really lucky, you find one of the four hidden documents.  Finding all the documents themselves can be quite a challenge, especially on a large map of rooms, but it might get kinda old and boring.  That is where the other spy comes into play.  Your AI opponent is not only searching for the same documents, but is laying traps for you as well.  You not only have to worry about trip-wires with explosives tied to doors or between furniture, but any object capable of holding a document, you know, that stuff you have to search, is also capable of holding a bomb.  There is even remotely-triggered devices that can be set off from a different room.  But you can return the favor and do all this same stuff to your opponent as well.

And don’t worry about the game getting suddenly easier if you quickly kill your opponent.  That isn’t the end-game.  If you kill him, anything he has discovered is randomly replaced somewhere in the game and he randomly starts over in a different room.  You don’t win until you find all the documents and make it to the exit.

When you start a new game, you can choose which character you are playing, which of three different environments that you want to play (lab, office, or castle), and the size of your grid of rooms (3×3, 4×4, or a very large 6×6).  Besides the tutorial level, there are campaign modes, quick-play modes, multi-player modes (over wifi) where you either host or join a game, and challenge mode that uses the Crystal platform to play against different opponents there.

I did have two issues with the game.  First, in the tutorial, I got to a point where it said I had found all the documents, but it wouldn’t let me leave because it said I needed to find all the documents.  I went through all the rooms a couple more times and couldn’t find anything that I had not already examined, so I gave up on the tutorial.  The second issue was once I got into the game itself.  My map, as you can see in the bottom corner of my second screenshot, seemed to be disabled.  Maybe there is something I needed to do in order to activate it and see my location in relation to the exit and opponent, but it would have been nice if that was spelled out a bit more with some documentation or help.  It might have covered that in the tutorial, but like I said, I didn’t complete it and a FAQ inside the game or online somewhere might help.

I only have two suggestions for this game.  First, I wish the interaction/shooting/killing between the two agents when they find each other was a bit easier to control and had a bit more to it.  I’m not sure exactly what I’d do to change it, but I think it could be improved.  Second, the tutorial tells you to select certain weapons from your inventory to use, but the items are not really identified when you pull up the inventory.  They have different graphics and are a bit easy to recognize once you know what they are, but this is where some kind of FAQ might come in handy where each of the different types of weapons and different game play modes are described in a bit more detail.

Overall, I really liked this game.  If there was another player in the house so that I could personalize who I was playing against and blowing up with my traps, it might just make my must-have list.  But as a $0.99 adventure/puzzle game, I think it is definitely worth the money and recommend it.

At first glance, Trucks & Skulls might come across as a clone of the very successful Angry Birds.  Those making that assumption though are going to miss some key features that set this title apart.  While there *are* similarities between the titles, there are also differences that legitimize giving this $0.99 title a second look.

Game play is simple.  Launch six different types of trucks at a target with the intent to blow up all the skulls.  Like Angry Birds, this is done by selecting the force of the launch and its angle.  You do this my adjusting the position of the controller that is located just under the top end of the ramp.

There are multiple types of trucks.  Some use brute force.  Some have explosives.  And, like Angry Birds, a tap on the screen post-launch and with the proper timing is required in order to be successful on each level.  This game adds a twist with the addition of lava pools though and anything that hits them is destroyed.  A trailer showing the game in action is available on YouTube.

With over 120 levels in three different initial “episodes”, the developers didn’t sit around after the initial release.  Not only did they recently come out with an update with a whole new set of 15 levels, but the game offers something that I haven’t seen in other games of this genre…you are offered custom levels that can be installed as web links opened in the game.  I see this as a great way to possibly open up level creation online in the future.  Some of the help information seems to suggest sharing custom levels with/from friends, so it will be interesting to see where this is going.  Another thing that sets this title apart is that it has an option to allow you to create screenshots for sharing via Facebook, Twitter, Email, or saving them in your photo library.

I am kinda at a loss when it comes to making any suggestions for this game.  The graphics are excellent.  With leaderboards and Game Center rankings, along with sharing screen shots and possibly levels, the developers of this game seem to have thought of everything.  It even has the separate volume controls for music and sound effects, something that I really like and notice when it is missing.  The game even has a nice zooming in and out feature that makes it nice.  As such, I have no problem at all recommending this title.  I’d give it just as high of a recommendation as Angry Birds.  So if you are tired of shooting birds at pigs and want something a bit more macho, try shooting exploding trucks at skulls balanced over lava.  You won’t be disappointed.

Pixeline And The Jungle Treasure is a new release coming to the app store on December 6th.  You can see a trailer for the iPad version on YouTube.  Following in the same platform genre as games like Ice Age or Toki Tori, Pixeline really brings back a sense of nostalgia for me.  It reminds me of the 1980′s when I spent countless hours on an old EGA MS-DOS system playing Captain Comic.  Like Captian Comic, the game spans multiple levels across multiple worlds.  Pixeline has a total of four different character types, five different worlds, and a total of twenty-three different levels.

The controls are very intuitive.  A little slider on the bottom left is used to move forward or backward.  An icon on the bottom right corner is used to make the character jump.  By combining direction with jumping, you are able to access the different levels in the game to either collect coins and treasure chests, gain extra lives, avoid dangers, and so forth.

I have very minor suggestions for this game.  The pop-up tips often disappear before I get fully through them.  I’d like for them to be a bit delayed with possibly a tap on the screen making them disappear.  And while the game does offer three save slots so that different people can save their progress, it would be nice if there was also some settings to control music and sound effects.

I am not sure the price point for the game once it goes live, but I’d recommend it in the $0.99 or $1.99 price.  If you are a fan of games like Super Mario Brothers or other platform type games, this one would be a nice one to add to your collection.

Aqua Panic is a new BulkyPix title to hit the iPhone App store.  It is a new take on the physics genre of game in that it is more than gravity that you have to deal with.  You also have to deal with water and water flow.  Your goal is to get all your little fishies safe to the bottom of the screen.  To to this, however, you need to go through or around different obstacles.  This is done via either blowing your way through them with carefully placed (and limited) bombs, or placement of instant-grow plants that divert the water flow.

There are two different versions of the game.  The free version is a freemium model that allows you to to upgrade to a total of 32 additional levels for $0.99.  The “deluxe” version of the game is priced at $3.99 and has 80 different levels with 8,000 fishies to save.

While I enjoyed the unique game play, I do have some suggestions.  First, the controls, while discussed in the game, were a bit difficult to figure out when first launching the game and trying to turn off or turn down the game music in the game options.  Once I figured out the scroll-and-tap interface, I found that there were no sound options.  That would be my second suggestion.

While I don’t see this title replacing Angry Birds or Cut The Rope on the top of the physics game category, it does offer unique game play and is a welcome respite from all the clone wars that seem to clutter the app store.  If you like physics games, it is definitely worth checking out.

I’ve used Zazzle before for custom cards, calendars, and such.  I’ve always been happy with them when it comes to quality products.  And I was quite excited to find out that they came out with a line of custom iPhone cases.

These iPhone cases are of two-part clamshell design and fit with precision.  The overall design is a bit slimmer than my prior case.  And, while there is a bit of lens flair from the flash while taking flash pictures, it isn’t as bad as the prior case I was using.

The thing that sets these cases apart though is that you can have any image you would like printed on the fabric on the back side of the case.  The end result is something that has a very “canvas” feel to it.  While I was originally intending on making a case with a custom QR code containing all my contact information should I ever loose my phone, I instead decided on one of my colorful fractals so that I could see how well the colors turned out in the printing.   As you can see in the original image, the colors came out a bit more vibrant than the original.  I actually like the vibrant colors better.  While this works with a nice design like what I used though, I’m not sure how well it is going to translate to a photo of people.  Also, as you can see in my image, if you are going to add text to the bottom of the design, you should take into account the plastic wrap-around nature of the side pieces so that the bottom part of your lettering does not get cut off.

Creating the design is simple.  Simply upload the image of your choice, position it where you would like, and add any optional text that you prefer.  It only allowed me to select a black font color though.  I would have preferred if additional colors were available.  The overall turn-around from designing the case and submitting the order until delivery was 12-days, and included the Thanksgiving holiday.

Starting at $39.95, I really like this case and it will likely replace the other one I was using.  I think the custom nature of these cases would make for the perfect holiday gift idea for any of your loved ones with an iPhone.  While the link I provided above is for the iPhone 4 case, cases are also available for the iPad and the 3G/3GS models.  For anyone wanting to make that Christmas iPhone or iPad really special, I’d suggest checking out these cases.