VS. Racing for iPhone is the first game from Maciek Drejak Labs and is a top down racer which reminds me of the old school classic Super Sprint.
The game gives you a top down view of the racing track with you and your opponents taking up just a handful of pixels as you race around a variety of tracks that twist and turn around the screen.
The tracks are to scale with the miniature cars but despite their size they provide lots of detail, tricky corners, fast straights and various surfaces that affect the handling of the cars.
The game has a narrative in the single player mode where you play the role of Ryan, a rookie racing driver who you have to bring up through the ranks of five championships on your way to the World Championship Finals.
While the narrative is fun it’s pretty irrelevant to the racing and luckily it doesn’t get in the way of it either. In fact you can move from race to race pretty quickly which means the action keeps coming thick and fast.
You have a choice of controls for your car which includes both touch and accelerometer controls. My weapon of choice was the touch controls which I found very responsive. You only need to worry about steering as acceleration is automatic.
Included with the auto-acceleration is a speed boost which helps you catch up if you are running behind the leader, however this is a double edge sword as this speed boost also applies to your opponents so large leads can be eaten into pretty quickly.
This is no bad thing though as it keeps all of the races exciting right up until the last corner and while this may be a little frustration the speed in which you can replay the race means that you can get your revenge very quickly.
The multi-player options are local bluetooth & wifi and Facebook leaderboards which includes a Ghost Mode so that you can races against your friends ghost cars. These are fun alternatives to the single player mode but GameCenter integration and online multi-player would be nice additions.
If you enjoy racing games of all descriptions you won’t be disappointed with VS. Racing especially if you can grab it while it’s still free. With future free updates also promised this could be a real bargain.
[rating: 4/5]What we like
What to know
When your catalog consists of some of the biggest, most popular and dominating titles in mobile gaming you could be forgiven for resting on your laurels and continue to milk that money cow. That’s not the case for Rovio Entertainment Ltd., the makers of the Angry Birds series who have released Amazing Alex for iPhone and iPad into the App Store.
Amazing Alex uses previously successfully implemented techniques, it’s a physics based puzzle game with usually 3 star per level rating system for each level, and as those features have worked before there’s no reason why they shouldn’t work again…..right?
Alex is a young boy with a taste for creativity and problem solving and in the style of toppling a chain of dominoes, only on a much larger scale, you are challenged to help Alex produce a daisy chain of events to clear each level.
The initial levels get you started on how you play the game, even showing you where you should place the range of objects that you are given to utilize on each level, and because of this you may be fooled into thinking that Amazing Alex is going to be a simple game that you can rush through in a matter of minutes.
However, that is soon to be shown as a wrong assumption to make as when the placement guides disappear the levels immediately get more complex and as you continue to the Classroom, Backyard, Bedroom and finally onto the Treehouse the levels become more and more challenging, especially, if like me, you want to get three stars on each level.
There are over 30 objects at your disposal across the levels and as these become unlocked they are also made available to build your own levels which has the potential of adding an endless number of levels for you to play with.
Creating your own levels is very easy. You have all of the objects that you’ve unlocked and can place them anywhere on the screen with guidelines for legal and illegal placement. The final step is to place the 3 stars on the screen which act as the measure for other players to complete the level.
The ease of both creating your own levels, sharing them online and then downloading other players levels is amazing. The only issue I have with the custom levels is that there is no rank of them, either via voting or just the number of downloads to help you find the best custom levels available.
As you might expect from Rovio the whole game looks polished, cute and engaging. Something else that Rovio seem keen to do is keep their iPhone and iPad versions of their apps separate rather than universal. Why they do this, especially considering that there are no differences between the two versions is beyond me. Needless to say if you want Amazing Alex on both your iPhone and iPad you’ll need to pay twice and play it twice as there is no synchronisation of your progress between the two versions.
Of course Rovio promise multiple free updates to add more levels and based on their previous history there should be quite a lot of them! Quite what they plan to do with the GameCenter integration with no leaderboards and only one achievement remains to be seen.
[rating: 4/5]What we like
What to know
You know the story, alien has diamonds, alien loses diamonds, you help alien collect diamonds! It’s the usual story that you hear everyday and now you can live it on on your iPhone and iPad in the universal game My Diamonds.
If you’ve played such games as Cut The Rope, Where’s my Water or even Angry Birds then you will feel right at home with this fun physics puzzler which challenges you to collect diamonds in over 60 levels spread across the garden, garage and kitchen.
To add an additional twist over the three star rating system of most other similar games My Diamonds creatively adds an additional star so on each level you are rated on speed and accuracy out of 4 rather than the usual 3.
The graphics are relatively simple but they effectively represent the three environments and the various tools that are put to your disposal to collect the diamonds that pour from the multiple faucets when you choose to turn them on.
Given that you are in control of when the diamonds start flowing from the faucets you are given the opportunity to move the multitude of objects that you can use to impact the movement of the diamonds.
A nice feature is the way that ghost diamonds will initially flow from the faucet that will provide an outline of where the real diamonds will go once you turn them on. Aligning them with the ghost diamonds wont always get 100% of your diamonds but it gets you to with the odd tweak of completing the levels with all the stars.
Another nice touch is that you can move the objects while the diamonds are in motion, this is sometimes a requirement of the level, other times it’s a feature that can help you take shortcuts to complete the level.
You’ll start with 20 levels in the garden before moving on to another 20 in the garage before moving into the kitchen. As with most games these days if you aren’t willing or able to unlock the later levels you can do so with a one off in-app purchase of 99 cents on top of the initial 99 cent outlay for the game itself.
Overall My Diamonds {$.99, App Store} is a fun physics puzzle game with charm and a decent amount of challenge and given the promise of further levels via free updates, achievements and high scores via Game Center integration it should be an easy choice for players that like this genre of games.
The one problem that it would be nice to see addressed especially considering that this is a universal app is the inability to synchronise your progress between devices, perhaps that will come in a future free update too!
[rating: 4/5]What we like
What to know
This milestone for the wildly successful app also comes just days within Bolt Creative releasing Pocket God #1, a new comic book based on characters from the game, which will be the first issue of a new four part mini-series.
Starting out as just a week-long pet project for Dave Castelnuovo and Allan Dye, Pocket God became a breakout success just months after its release. What began as a great sandbox app where the only premise was to torture loyal islander subjects has transformed into one of the most beloved titles on the App Store. With more than 30 free updates, which have introduced a slew of mini-games, new islands, and creative ways to end Pygmy lives, Pocket God continues to remain in the top 50 Paid App list on iTunes, consistently impressing players old and new with its deviant humor and all around fun.
“We can’t thank the fans enough for all their support, enthusiasm, fan sites, YouTube videos, suggestions for content, and everything else,” said Bolt Creative CEO Dave Castelnuovo. “Since day one we’ve embraced our community and we’re ecstatic to see that feeling reciprocated. We’ll continue to push Pocket God into new realms and keep giving the legions of PG fans out there more tools to become great deities. Deities great at offing the little islanders that is!”
For more information about Pocket God, please visit www.boltcreative.com.
For more information on the Pocket God comic book, please visit www.ape-entertainment.com or www.boltcreative.com.
To read the misadventures of Ooga and the rest of the Pygmies, check out Pocket God #1 on iTunes at http://bit.ly/pgcomictp073010
Pocket God can be purchased in the iTunes App Store by pointing your browser to http://bit.ly/pgtp073010
Bolt Creative is a San Francisco-based developer creating original iPhone applications and games, including 2009’s blockbuster iPhone game Pocket God. Bolt Creative’s goal is to create games that are not only fun to play, but fun to develop and make them laugh. For more information, please visit www.boltcreative.com.
]]> https://touchreviews.net/pocket-god-hits-monumental-threemillion-sales-mark/feed/ 1BACIS – The Puzzle Game is a new puzzle game from AntDroid Games where your task is to clear each of the 50 levels of the Baci that inhabit them by flicking them to their corresponding colored exit points.
Bacis appears to be some kind of bacteria that have infested the surfaces of your kitchen and your task is to clean them all up. The kitchen surface is made up of a collection of squares each joined with a criss-cross of lines that the Bacis travel along.
Each level contains a variety of Bacis each of them color coded to their destination. To move a Baci you simple touch it an it will start bouncing up and down on the screen. With the Bacis selected you can then flick it in the direction you wish it to travel. The Bacis will slide along the line in until it reaches the end of the line and if that line is the edge of the surface then you’ll lose it and you’ll need to start again.
So this is where the puzzle element of the game comes in as you must only make moves that will move your Bacis to it’s required destination without it falling from the kitchen surface. At the beginning this can be easily achieved as the end points are clear and obvious, however as you move through the levels the solutions become more convoluted requiring multiple moves and using other Bacis as blocks to prevent your active Bacis from falling off of the kitchen surface.
Each of the Bacis are well drawn and animated and remind me of the the creatures created by Ricky Gervais in his range of Flaminal books.
While the idea and puzzles are well put together and if the promises of future free updates do manifest themselves to the promise of 300 levels then at $1.99 BACIS – The Puzzle Game could be great value for money. This value for money factor is raised even more when you consider that the single app works on both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch, although with no additional features for the iPad version.
However, there are a couple of items that let BACIS down. First there is the navigation system which uses a simple font on a transparent backdrop that is not particularly easy on the eye. This is in contrast to the in-game graphics which are clear and easy to understand.
It would also be nice if because the playing area is larger than the iPod/iPhones screen it was possible to pinch and zoom to see the full playing area while instead the only option is to drag your finger across the screen to see all of it.
Another problem is the way you enter your name at the end of each level to record your high score, up to 7 characters can be entered to represent your name but instead of simply using the standard keyboard to enter your name they have used 7 different buttons on different levels to scroll through the alphabet. At least the name is remembered each time you complete subsequent levels but if you wish to change your name or if another player wishes to enter their name they will have to go through the painful process all over again.
Finally there is the Help system which through a combination of poor grammar and poor use of headings is difficult to understand and certainly doesn’t add to the ease of understanding the game.
The underlying game play of BACIS – The Puzzle Game suggests that it could be another strong addition to the Apps Stores long list of fun puzzle games but until the numerous bugs are addressed BACIS is more frustrating than enjoyable.
Price: $1.99 (iTunes Store)
Category: Games
Released: Jun 18, 2010
Version: 1.3
Size: 17.6 MB
Language: English
Seller: Alpha-Tauri Interactive Ltd.
© Alpha-Tauri Interactive Ltd.
Requirements: Compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Requires iOS 3.0 or later.
The developers of ReaddleDocs have shown great interest in improving the app by releasing free updates for existing customers. The lastest Version 2.0 has set new standards for any business app in the App Store. Readdle has paid close attention to develop a superior user interface and offers advance features which would be hard to match at $4.99 (iTunes Store)
The update brings significant improvements in the overall performance, adds new features and makes the UI look more impressive than ever.
Version 2.0 Main Features:
Screenshots
