Of all of the fighters SNK offered up on its new platform, Fatal Fury was the biggest success. It had a very different feel from its cousin Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, but it certainly wasn’t lacking in mechanical depth or interesting characters. It’s not hard to figure out why SNK fast-tracked a sequel for release in the following year, though it would have to make do without Nishiyama, who was already on to other responsibilities. Fortunately, Fatal Fury 2 would benefit from being able to borrow some ideas from Capcom’s ground-breaking title. The result was a fusion of the elements that made the first game so interesting and aspects that were quickly becoming codified within the genre.

The sequel addressed the biggest shortcoming the first game had when stacked against Street Fighter II by expanding the roster of playable fighters from three to eight. Among the new characters was a kunoichi named Mai Shiranui, whose bouncy personality and, er, other bouncy elements made her a big fan favorite almost immediately. Other major additions include the taekwondo master Kim Kaphwan and a new big bad named Wolfgang Krauser. It was another big success for SNK, but there were more lessons to learn from Capcom that would be picked up for the following year’s Fatal Fury game.

Capcom had hit it big with Street Fighter II, and it seemed hesitant to slap a new number on any follow-up. At the same time, there was money on the table and Capcom wasn’t about to leave it there. Thus, four iterative follow-ups were produced to keep the quarters flowing, each one taking what had already been built and adding a little extra on top. This was the approach SNK would take for 1993’s Fatal Fury Special ($3.99). This game uses Fatal Fury 2 as a basis and makes a number of improvements and additions. The boss characters from the previous game are now playable, and the three characters cut from the original game have been restored. The gameplay speed has been increased, and a new combo system has been implemented to bring things ever closer to the Street Fighter II standard.

There was also an interesting secret in Fatal Fury Special. The main character of one of SNK’s other popular fighters, Ryo Sakazaki of Art of Fighting, made a special guest appearance in the game. Should the player beat all fifteen opponents without losing a single round, they’ll face off against Ryo after felling Krauser. Defeating him added him to the playable roster, and it was this fun little trick that served as the seed for The King of Fighters ’94, a mega-crossover of SNK characters that kicked off SNK’s bread and butter series from then on. That was all in the future, of course. In the present, Fatal Fury Special was the most successful game yet in the Fatal Fury series.

In the here and now, I would argue there are better games in the Fatal Fury franchise, but Fatal Fury Special is certainly a great one. I’d certainly recommend it in a general sense. Of course, we have to deal with the usual Arcade Archives issues when it comes to fighting games. I’ll go through them again for the benefit of anyone who is new to these reviews, but if you’ve read one of these before you know what I’m going to say.

Using touch controls with any of SNK’s fighting games is always going to be a bit of a challenge. You can have some fun with it, but it’s less than ideal. If you have an external controller and don’t mind using it, then you have nothing to worry about. The game plays very well that way. Multiplayer is also limited to those who have the right set-up. You’ll need a couple of external controllers, plus a display you feel comfortable enough having you and a friend crowding around. No wi-fi multiplayer and certainly no online multiplayer.

As a result of these demands, I imagine most people who buy this game will be playing against the CPU with touch controls. It’s hardly the best way to enjoy a game like this, but I won’t say you can’t enjoy it. You can turn down the difficulty all the way if you like thanks to the robust set of options Hamster has included here, and you might get some extra enjoyment out of the usual Score Attack and timed Caravan modes. And hey, if you can beat Krauser with touch controls then you have my respect. That and a buck won’t even get you a can of Coke these days, but you’ll have it.

Anyway, that’s where we’ll park this one. Fatal Fury Special isn’t the very best fighting game we’ve seen in the ACA NEOGEO line so far, but it’s certainly in the upper tier. It unfortunately has to deal with all the usual problems that come with fighters in this line, but I didn’t exactly expect Hamster to solve that problem at this point. If you’ve found some entertainment in prior NEOGEO fighters adapted to mobile, you’ll likely get some here as well.

If you’ve never heard of River City Girls, it is actually a new entry in the Kunio-kun/River City franchise from Arc System Works, but one that has you playing as Misako and Kyoko instead of Kunio and Riki. It excelled for its style, music, voice acting, and most of the gameplay when I played it on Xbox a few years ago. The Switch version was plagued with some performance issues, but is in a better place right now. It did have co-op, and I always felt like the game was balanced around that rather than being accessible to solo players.

There’s quite a bit of freedom in River City Girls through its open-esque locations with shops, enemies, and more. As a beat ’em up, it isn’t as polished as something like Streets of Rage 4 if you’ve played that, but I still think fondly of how much I enjoyed River City Girls and still love its characters. Moving from location to location and eventually getting to memorable boss fights (some sadly aren’t fun), and upgrading and unlocking more for your characters. This is one area I wish the team went back to balance better. If you play solo like I did both originally and now, the game feels too tedious with enemies having what feels like inflated health pools. After unlocking and upgrading a bit, things become a lot more fun, but it is still challenging even on normal difficulty. I couldn’t test the online on the mobile version, but the game itself only supported local co-op. I hope if WayForward does bring River City Girls 2 to mobile, it includes the online multiplayer as well with cross platform matchmaking.

Now, River City Girls on iOS on my iPhone 15 Pro and iPad Pro (2020) has performance issues. It also looks excellent in most parts. The few issues I ran into have to do with how the aspect ratio of certain things has been handled causing cropping or elements hidden behind the home bar in parts. Some of the touch targets are also too small with tiny text in menus. These usually are the tabs you’d swap between in the menu using the shoulder buttons on the controller, but they need to be tweaked for iPhone and iPad. One more thing I’d like to see is proper cloud save support. I logged into my account on both iPhone and iPad and my progress did not sync across for the game.

Speaking of controls, River City Girls has controller support, and it works great. It does only show Xbox button prompts in my testing at least. When using touchscreen controls, you sadly cannot adjust the positions or size of these touchscreen buttons unless I missed something. They work well on iPad, but feel a bit cramped on the phone. I hope a future update can add options to adjust these like we’ve seen in the Hitman: Blood Money – Reprisal release.

Barring the few control and interface issues, River City Girls still has the flaws of the original game with regards to balance for solo play and some bosses not being as much fun. This version is updated though, so you don’t mistakenly end up changing location when you’re attacking enemies near a door or something. I did enjoy revisiting it a few years later though, and still prefer it to the sequel in many ways.

Whenever I review a game that’s only in a subscription service, it is worth looking at whether the game offers enough value to warrant subscribing to said service. River City Girls is priced at $29.99 on Nintendo Switch, and while it being “Free" for subscribers is fantastic, it isn’t enough to justify subscribing. Maybe when there are more games, but right now this is a good value add for existing subscribers. If you don’t have a Crunchyroll membership, details about subscription pricing are here on the official website. You need the Mega Fan tier ($9.99 per month) or the Ultimate Fan tier ($14.99 per month) to also access the games in the Crunchyroll Game Fault.

If you already have River City Girls on another platform, there isn’t anything of note with this release to warrant replaying it. If you don’t, and have a Crunchyroll subscription that includes the Game Vault, it is absolutely worth playing. I always liked River City Girls despite its flaws, and while I hope the iOS version gets patched to improve controls and its interface, it is a good port. River City Girls itself is gorgeous with an amazing soundtrack, and I still prefer it to the sequel.

To get the usual talk out of the way, let’s address the old app. It’s still on the App Store and still technically works, after all. Heck, it was just updated a year ago to be compatible with iOS 14. That doesn’t mean it’s a great experience on modern devices, though. Dotemu’s The King of Fighters ’97 ($2.99) came out more than ten years ago, and for its time and place it was a great port of the game. It played as well as it could, the emulation was sound, it had support for the kinds of external controllers we had at the time, and offered local wireless multiplayer support. It wasn’t exactly rolling in options, but it was more than good enough. Time has taken its toll, however. The biggest issue these days is that the virtual buttons didn’t grow along with the displays of devices, and it’s even tougher than usual to play on tiny buttons. I can’t recommend the Dotemu version anymore, I don’t think SNK should be selling two versions at the same time, and I expect the publisher to deprecate it sooner or later. Get the new one.

Anyway, The King of Fighters ’97. It came out in 1997 on the NEOGEO, so the title of this app certainly checks out. It was the fourth game in the series that had by this point become SNK’s most reliable franchise, and brought the Orochi Saga story arc to its close. In terms of gameplay, it introduced a system where you could choose between two playing styles before picking your team. The Advanced Mode followed in the footsteps of The King of Fighters ’96, albeit with some tweaks, while the Extra Mode takes after The King of Fighters ’94 and ’95. This addition not only did a great job of tying all of the previous games together, but also gave players greater customization and variety in how they played the game.

In terms of character selection, six characters from the previous game were dropped. Kasumi Todoh, Mature, Vice, Geese Howard, Wolfgang Krauser, and Mr. Big all hit the benches for story reasons. Chizuru Kagura moves from the sub-boss position into the regular playable roster, while fan favorites Blue Mary and Ryuji Yamazaki from the Fatal Fury series join Billy Kane to form a new team. Yashiro Nanakase, Chris, and Shermie are fully new faces and end up serving an important story role. Otherwise, the roster carries over. Popular characters like Terry Bogard, Kyo Kusanagi, Iori Yagami, Mai Shiranui, and Athena Asamiya are all here along with many others. Plenty of great characters to learn to use, like any game in this series.

The usual ACA NEOGEO gripes with fighting games in particular apply here. First, it can be really cumbersome trying to make some of the commands work with the virtual controls. There are no assists here, unlike the Dotemu version, so if you don’t have an external controller of some kind you’re just going to have to make the best of it. It’s also very difficult to get multiplayer going, as you’ll need a couple of external controllers and a display you’re comfortable rubbing elbows around. In other words, you’re probably going to be spending most of your time playing alone. The story here is certainly worth going through though, and you have plenty of options to tweak to give yourself as much of an edge against the rude CPU as possible.

If you don’t mind the multiplayer being hard to get at and have an external controller, this is a great experience. Just like playing the Arcade Archives release on any other device, but with a few bucks more in your pocket. You get the usual extra modes here, and they’re alright to mess around with. You can also choose between the Japanese and Overseas versions of the game, which is good if you enjoy blood and bounce, as the kids say. In terms of options, you can adjust the difficulty, remap buttons, tweak video and sound settings, and customize the virtual pad to your liking. Online leaderboards are also here, as usual. I don’t typically think of fighters as games to compete on leaderboards with, but if you get into that kind of thing, it’s here.

The King of Fighters ’97 is a terrific fighting game and another of the many feathers in SNK’s hat in this genre. If you have an external controller and plan to play solo, it’s easily worth picking up. Those stuck with touch controls will want to carefully consider what they are really looking for out of this kind of thing, but I’m just repeating myself here from prior reviews. Hamster has done a really good job with this release, also as usual, and I think it’s only a better set of multiplayer options away from being the best possible mobile port it could be.

Let’s get right to that, then. Despite being able to save yourself a buck by buying the old version, I give my strongest recommendation that you do not do that. Some of those old Dotemu apps are still somewhat working, but Samurai Shodown II is in very rough shape. Its external controller support is spotty, it crashes semi-regularly, the touch controls are in a sorry state due to being designed for far smaller displays, and there are some emulation glitches on top of that. Don’t buy the old version. Friends don’t let friends buy the old version. SNK really ought to remove it from the store at this point.

Alright, that’s settled. So let’s talk about Samurai Shodown II as a game, and this ACA NEOGEO version of it. When people are asked which Samurai Shodown game is their favorite, Samurai Shodown II tends to be the one that comes up most often. It has a great roster, the play mechanics are well-balanced, and it has a lot of depth without getting too caught up in gimmicky systems. In a sense, it is the original Samurai Shodown concept in its purest, most ideal form. After this installment, there were a lot of attempts to change things up that met with varying degrees of success. I have a fair bit of fondness for every game in this series, and I tend to lean towards SamSho V Special as the best one, but I think I would be most likely to recommend Samurai Shodown II to someone looking to break into the series.

Of course, we’ve got the usual issues when it comes to this mobile ACA NEOGEO version. Samurai Shodown II has a lot of very involved special moves with precise motions you’ll need to do with the stick and buttons. If you have an external controller, then that’s fine. Connect your controller and have a good time. If you’re stuck with the touch controls, however, this might be one of the most problematic NEOGEO fighters to play. It’s really hard to do the more advanced moves using the virtual stick, and unlike with the Dotemu version there are no crutches for using special moves built in. If you’re willing to spend a fair bit of time with it, you might be able to get to a point where this isn’t a huge problem, but it’s always going to be a second-class experience.

It would be less of an issue if it were easier to play against another human, because at least you would be equally disadvantaged. If you’ve read any of my ACA NEOGEO reviews before, you know the drum I am about to bang. The only way to play multiplayer in this game is to use multiple external controllers and huddle around one display. If you have the set-up for it, then it’s a fine experience. But I think that’s a big “if". Realistically, you’re going to be battling against the challenging CPU opponent, who has no problems using its own special moves against you. Even the Bluetooth local multiplayer as seen in the Dotemu version would be a big help. It’s not that there isn’t some fun to be had here, especially for the reasonable price, but unless you’ve got the right set-up you aren’t going to be able to enjoy this game the way it’s meant to be.

I’ve said all of this before in every ACA NEOGEO fighting game review I’ve done, and I assume most of you are used to it by now. I would go so far as to say you probably anticipated I would be talking about all of these points. If so, you might be the sort that has been able to get over these issues before and enjoy these fighters. You just want to know how this game in particular is. Well, it’s really good. Samurai Shodown II rules. Hamster’s emulation is fantastic. You get lots of options to tweak as you like, and if you turn the difficulty all the way down you can have some fun slicing up the CPU opponent without much pushback. There are the usual Score Attack and timed Caravan extra modes, and you can choose between the Japanese and overseas versions of the game. Online leaderboards are here if you’re looking for some competition, and I could see some people really getting into that end of things.

I think with all of these ACA NEOGEO releases, we have to weigh the benefits of the low price and ease of access against the cons of some features being restricted and the overall playability being a fair bit worse for those using touch controls. I’m personally of the mindset that even these fighters can be worth the few bucks you’ll spend just to have the occasional bout against the computer. It’s a bit of enjoyable stress release as long as you quit before you get to the frustrating boss fights. But I also think that unless you have just the right conditions, this is probably the worst way to play the game on modern platforms. Absolutely, unquestionably better than the version we already had on mobile, but if you have another means of playing Samurai Shodown II, you should take it.

That’s really where I’m at with Samurai Shodown II. I’m glad we have a better version of the game. That old app needed to be updated or trashed, and I think it would be wise if SNK did the latter. It was fine in its time, but ten years is absolute eons in mobile gaming. This ACA NEOGEO version is up to Hamster’s established level of quality, and that’s a great thing. As to the game itself, Samurai Shodown II is excellent, and perhaps one of the finest on the NEOGEO, but this isn’t an ideal way to enjoy it. That being said, if you can accept the various challenges that come with the usual ACA NEOGEO suite of options, then by all means grab your katana and get to work.

I actually wrote the TouchArcade review for The King of Fighters ’98 (Dotemu version) nine years ago. I’m going to borrow a bit from myself to introduce the game before we start making comparisons. Shaun of 2014, take it away!

“The King of Fighters ’98 represents the first “Dream Match" installment of the series, where the story is set aside so that old and new characters can appear alongside each other, even if they’re dead or it doesn’t fit the plot. As such, with a few notable exceptions, this game has every character from King of Fighters ’94 through King of Fighters ’97, rounding out the roster to an impressive 38 characters. If that’s not enough for you, nine of the characters even have alternate versions that reflect an earlier incarnation. What makes that number of characters even more impressive is how well-balanced the game is. While some characters, like Iori or Kyo, definitely outshine others, such as Andy or Billy, the gap between the best and the worst is smaller than just about any other fighting game with such a large list of playables.

As usual for the series, you pick a team of three characters and fight it out against other teams of three. This installment was from the era where you couldn’t tag in and out freely, instead choosing the order in which your fighters will appear. If you finish off your opponent, your character’s health will get restored a little and the next fresh opponent will face you in the next round. Eliminate the whole opposing team and you win. KOF ’98 carries forward the Advanced and Extra modes from KOF ’97, offering different styles of building and using your super meter. Aside from the roster changes and balancing, the gameplay isn’t much different from the previous year’s version, but that’s pretty typical for a fighting game sequel. There’s no story, and the boss this time around is Omega Rugal, an SNK boss if there ever was one."

Alright, that seems adequate. Odds are good that if you’re reading this, you probably already have a decent idea of what The King of Fighters ’98 is. You might even own that previous version. So let’s get to the proper meat and see how Hamster’s KOF ’98 fares against Dotemu’s The King of Fighters ’98. First, I will say that the emulation quality is excellent on both. Once you’re in the game and playing, there’s very little to distinguish the two. The sound is a bit better on Hamster’s version to my ear, but only a bit. Dotemu’s version skips the attract mode and title screen, so Hamster’s version does offer a more authentic arcade experience. Both versions support external controllers, and that is the recommended way to play.

That will bring us to the first major difference: the touch controls. Dotemu’s version is customized to an extent, with context-specific touch buttons, an SP button for easy activation of special moves, and a choice between the standard four button layout or six buttons with some button combos. You can adjust the size and opacity of these controls, but since this is a fairly old app even the maximum size is a bit on the small side. You can’t move them around, either. Hamster’s version uses the same stock touch controls seen in its other Arcade Archives releases. There are no special buttons or combo buttons here, but you can move around the existing virtual buttons, chance their opacity and size, adjust the diagonal sensitivity, and even choose whether the input on the stick will be digital or analog. I’m not going to lie: Dotemu’s SP button makes it easier to bust out moves with touch controls, but Hamster wins in every other regard.

Indeed, broadly speaking, Hamster gets the win in options. Hamster’s version allows you to tweak a few specific gameplay settings where Dotemu’s just allows you change the difficulty level. Hamster allows you to fully remap controls; Dotemu’s does not. In terms of video settings, Hamster allows you to change the screen layout and orientation, turn the wallpaper on or off, whether you want to display “off-screen" graphics (things that the bezel of most displays would have hidden back in the day, and gives you a wild degree of customizability in terms of applying filters to the visuals. Dotemu lets you choose whether you want a smoothing filter on or off, and if you want scanlines. Hamster offers sound setting options; Dotemu does not. You can make a save state and resume later in Hamster’s version, but in Dotemu’s you have to start over every time. Hamster is the clear winner here.

The extras are where things get a little messier. Hamster offers its usual selection. You can pick between the Japanese and International versions in standard mode, and the standard Score Attack and timed Caravan modes are here. Each mode has its own online leaderboard to compete on. Multiplayer is available, but only on the same device using multiple external controllers. Over on Dotemu’s side, you have a standard single-player mode using the International version of the game, a training mode that gives you a CPU dummy to beat up on, and support for multiplayer via local wireless. That last feature is a welcome one, as I personally feel it’s easier to set up matches with another person that way. Neither one supports online multiplayer, unfortunately. I’d give Dotemu the edge here, though it’s not a dramatic win.

The last difference is the price. This new version costs a dollar more than Dotemu’s old one. It’s just a dollar, but it’s still a dollar. That will get you at least a couple of slices of bread these days. Looking at the overall picture, which version is best is going to depend on your situation. The small virtual controls on Dotemu’s version really hurt its value if you’re not playing with an external controller. The training mode and more convenient multiplayer are great extras, and the game runs just as well. Hamster’s standard Arcade Archives features certainly give you more to play around with, but things like the Caravan mode aren’t as well-suited to fighters as they are to, say, shoot-em-ups. Multiplayer is pretty awkward to get going here, too.

If you already own the Dotemu version of The King of Fighters ’98, this new version doesn’t make a very compelling case for itself. If you don’t have either of them and are trying to choose, it’s a hard call. This one costs more and has more options and extras, but the Dotemu one has a couple of nice features you won’t find in this Arcade Archives release. I’d probably recommend this new one simply because it has a lower chance of being deprecated, but I think it’s otherwise a hard call. KOF ’98 is a great game that, like other arcade fighters, isn’t necessarily the best fit for mobile. It was dicey to recommend once, and I’m not sure I can muster much enthusiasm for a second dip.

I rarely find a yearly sports game that justifies a full-priced purchase each year. NBA 2K24 is pretty similar in that regard, so you might be wondering why I am reviewing it? I wanted to see how it feels on Steam Deck since I never played these games on Valve’s handheld, and also wanted to see how that version compares to the Xbox Series X (and PS5 version. I also wanted to highlight who should buy it right now, and who should wait on a sale. In this NBA 2K24 Steam Deck review, I’m going to focus on the game on Valve’s handheld gaming system, but also cover the game and how I found it in the time I’ve played across platforms.

Since NBA 2K18, every game in the series has been Steam Deck Verified. Knowing that, I expected NBA 2K24 to work well, and it plays without issues on Steam Deck out of the box. I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten verified yet, and my only real complaint with this release barring it being based on the last-gen version (which I will get to), is the install size. NBA 2K24 currently occupies 146.33GB on Steam Deck. This is smaller than the 170 or so GB on Xbox Series X, but still massive. I wouldn’t even be able to fit this into the internal SSD on my 256GB Steam Deck because of shaders and other data installed on it.

I installed NBA 2K24 on my SD card, and it ran perfectly. I didn’t change any settings initially, but settled on tweaking most things to medium or high and I turned shadows down to see if I could make it look crisper on the Deck’s display by sacrificing shadows. You won’t need to bother with any of this, but the game scales very well. It even has shader preload options and 16:10 support for many parts. I don’t know if NBA 2K23 offered all this, but NBA 2K24 feels and looks great on Steam Deck. I also tried it with my DualSense controller.

When it comes to game modes outside the default play modes, the Mamba Moments challenge mode here is quite nice, but I’d have liked to see more of a focus on Kobe Bryant’s legendary career in this game. The content in this mode is very good, but I was hoping for more basically. One area where NBA 2K24 does feel like a step back, is its MyCareer mode. On PS5 and Xbox Series X, there’s a whole set of WNBA content that isn’t available on prior platforms including MyCareer content and more. Barring that, the missing feature I’m disappointed by the most is the Eras quick play options that replicate the TV viewing experience with filters on Xbox Series X. These optional filters add a lot to the experience and this seems to be absent on PC. Check out the screenshot from Xbox Series X below:

Comparing NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck (or PC) with the Xbox Series X version, outside of visuals, the big differences are with game modes, movement, and overall content. The highlight is definitely cross play, which is possible with the NBA 2K24 PS5 and Xbox Series X|S native versions. The others don’t have cross play which is a huge deal in a game like this. NBA 2K24 is the first time cross play has been added as well to an NBA 2K game as far as I’m aware. Other differences include the lack of ProPLAY on PC. ProPLAY uses NBA footage translated in-game. More information on that is here. Even the game menus feel just fine on PC while the Xbox Series X version is a lot nicer.

While menus aren’t a huge deal for the gameplay, it basically feels like a representation of the overall product available on both platforms. NBA 2K24 on PC is a very good basketball game that has issues and is lacking compared to the new consoles, but NBA 2K24 itself also has too much of a push towards virtual currency in its various modes. If you ignore all that and just want a game to play casually or with friends, NBA 2K24 on PC is great on Steam Deck, but that’s a big caveat.

Thinking about the possibilities of NBA 2K25 bringing the new features and visuals to PC also might end up being problematic on Steam Deck. If said potential version is based on new consoles, it might not run and look as well on Steam Deck. This is all speculation of course, but the potential of NBA 2K25 doing more on PC has me excited. If it is the same last-gen version though, I likely won’t be bothering playing it on Steam Deck and stick to just PS5 or Xbox Series X. Having not played an NBA 2K game on PC before, I enjoyed my time with NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck. This is definitely getting Steam Deck Verified soon with how good it looks and plays.

While NBA 2K24 does have online play, I wanted to see if it was playable via Steam’s Remote Play Together. I invited a friend who doesn’t own the game to play on my Steam Deck with me. It worked really well despite the distance between us. One thing to note is that I’d recommend sticking to 800p on Steam Deck because 1080p with high and medium seems to be a bit too much for Steam Deck to maintain a locked 60fps. If you want to play on a 1080p display through the dock or something, consider turning more effects down.

Right now, I’d only recommend NBA 2K24 on Steam Deck if you skipped the last year or two of games. If you haven’t played these games in a while, NBA 2K24 runs and looks great on Steam Deck, and is a fun basketball game to play. The push to virtual currency in specific game modes definitely holds this back, alongside the lack of new modes and features on PC. Hopefully NBA 2K25 on PC will see it finally get the full feature set. Right now, I’d recommend NBA 2K24 more on Xbox Series X (or PS5) than PC, but the PC version plays great on Steam Deck if you’re after a great portable experience.

NBA 2K24 Steam Deck review score: 3.5/5

Want more Steam Deck coverage? Check out our Steam Deck category for reviews, news, interviews, features, and more here. Want us to cover something specific on Steam Deck? Let us know in the comments.

I still remember the first time I saw Cyber-Lip, because it was also the first time I saw a NEOGEO MVS cabinet. It was 1990, I was eleven years old, and I was over at my friend’s house for the weekend as I tended to be in those days. He lived over on the other side of town, the side of the town that frankly didn’t have a whole lot around besides houses. I’ll tell you what it did have, though: R & S Video. Run by a couple named Rod and Sheila, this place was one of the coolest locations in my boring-butt hometown. That was down to Rod being an absolute man-child and Sheila putting up with him as long as the money came in. Rod was a barely functioning alcoholic, a complete burn-out, and one of the more unique fellows I’ve ever known. He’s not with us anymore, and hasn’t been for a very long time. He tried to drink himself to death and he ended up being successful. But he was a very important part of my life, so cheers to him wherever he may be.

R & S Video was in the main a video rental shop, back when such things were a license to print money. They sold snacks, they rented VHS tapes and NES games, and they even sold saucy magazines. One of the few locations for that in my town, I’ll hasten to add. Slowly but surely, however, Rod’s other interests seeped in. Music, especially metal. Stereo equipment. Import game machines; I first played the Super Famicom via R & S Video, renting it for $27 for one night. But best of all, arcade games. Up until R & S Video opened, there were very few choices for arcade games in my town. There was The Pool Hall, where good kids were not allowed. The bad kids who smoked went there, you see. You could also find a few machines here and there in laundromats, the shopping mall, and such.

But man, R & S. Rod knew what was cool and hot and he wanted it in his place. He always had a fine selection of the best games, and when you saw a cabinet in a game magazine with some effusive praise attached to it, you could be sure it would soon arrive at R & S. It’s where I first played Street Fighter II, busting out a Hadouken. It’s where I saw Sub-Zero first rip out a spine, the bass booming throughout the shop as parents shuddered at the screams. And it is where I first encountered the NEOGEO, its own sound system being no slouch. Four games in one cabinet, and being a good Contra-loving lad my eyes were drawn to one in particular: Cyber-Lip.

I have to admit that at the time, and for a while after until an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly corrected, I thought the game’s name was Cyber-Up. That’s how it looked in the logo on the title screen, and Lip? Why Lip? It turns out, the big bad is a giant mouth. Yeah, that’s a thing. But wow, it was so colorful and detailed. The characters talked! Look out below! Ha. When you shot enemies, they broke apart into pieces. The bosses were big! You could grab onto overhanging bars and shoot at enemies below you! When you died, your guy came back on some kind of wicked rocket sled! Wow, what a game! I’d feed my meager quarters into it when I had the chance to, not make much progress, and then think about it until the next time I got to play it. Cyber-Up! Lip! Whatever! Now this is the power of the NEOGEO!

Cyber-Lip isn’t very good. It’s a very plain run-and-gun action game that has a decent but not spectacular presentation. It’s a far stiffer game than any of the good Contra games, and it’s a lot less inspired. It feels like half of the game involves popping out of an elevator and going through a slight remix of the same gunky sewer. The boss patterns are bland, but when the game decides to kill you it probably will. Some of the power-ups are enjoyable to use, but some of them like the grenade will put you in mortal danger if you’re flying solo. It has its moments to be sure, but even comparing it to Contra III: The Alien Wars on the Super NES lays bare its numerous failings.

The team that made Cyber-Lip would soon get up to much more important things. The key members went on to make Fatal Fury, and that went over somewhat better. The director of the game, after a solid tenure at SNK, left and joined DIMPS, where he worked on things like The Rumble Fish. None of the people involved with this game had anything to do with Metal Slug, which is a natural comparison given it is the other Contra-style run-and-gun on the system. Sure, five years separate the two and perhaps it isn’t fair to put them against each other as a result. But one can’t help but look at Metal Slug and think that it does what Cyber-Lip wanted to do, only infinitely better. We can shoot diagonally. We have the technology. If you’re going to play a NEOGEO run-and-gun action game, Metal Slug has five games you should play through before you even think of touching Cyber-Lip.

But right here, right now, in this mobile ACA NEOGEO context, I think I can give Cyber-Lip a light recommendation. Its lack of diagonal shooting makes it a bit easier to play with touch controls, assuming you aren’t using an external controller. If you get bored you can always make a save state and come back later. You probably won’t be able to play with a second player, but you can still have a decent time on your own. And I think the ending alone might be worth the price of admission here. Sixteen quarters for that kind of bonkers closing, one that was never followed up on at all? That seems pretty fair to me.

Cyber-Lip was sometimes used on good ol’ Nick Arcade for one of the game challenges. Kids would have to try to get the best score they could within a certain amount of time. You know, it’s not a bad score attack game. As usual, ACA NEOGEO has modes and leaderboards to support that. There are online leaderboards for the main mode, and you’ve also got a Score Attack and timed Caravan mode in case you really want to live out your fantasy of being called down by Phil Moore. There are better genres for this kind of thing, but it works better here than it does in, say, fighting games.

The usual ACA NEOGEO stuff. You get all the usual options and extras, include gameplay settings, video and audio options, and control customizations. You can play with an external controller if you like, or you can use touch controls. They’re not perfect, but you’ve got endless coins. Multiplayer requires enough controllers for all and a display to huddle around. The emulation is spot-on, but Cyber-Lip never taxed the NEOGEO much to begin with anyway.

If you enjoy run-and-gun action games and have tapped out the Metal Slug series on mobile, I think Cyber-Lip is worth the asking price. It’s not a great game and if I had paid a couple hundred bucks for a NEOGEO cartridge back in the day I don’t think I would have been very impressed, but for four bucks on mobile it offers more than enough thrills and weird things to shoot to make it worth your while. Just keep in mind this was a very early game on the system, and that the designers really couldn’t think of any better way to link stages other than an elevator. Also, never pick up the grenades, unless you want to be a goner. Cyber-Lip: it’s great, it’s bad, it’s fine. Evolution, friends.

If you’ve not played Samurai Shodown, it plays quite differently compared to mainstream fighting games. Having seen the series history through the Samurai Shodown NeoGeo Collection, I’m glad this Samurai Shodown reboot stuck to its guns and didn’t try and change things up to lose its own character. The weapons, footsies, unique characters, striking aesthetic, and more come together brilliantly, but this Samurai Shodown game has always been lacking in its online and story mode. The core gameplay is great, and I was hoping to see at least that translated to mobile well alongside all the in-game content.

Samurai Shodown on mobile initially feels like the complete game with touch controls, but it has some cutbacks. The first one is visuals. I expected it to look and run better on modern iOS devices given my experience with it on consoles. Visuals aren’t as bad as the Switch version though, and Samurai Shodown on newer iOS devices doesn’t feel sluggish like the Switch version. I also feel like some characters will feel very different here given the on-screen buttons being the only way to play including specials. This just is a very weird decision in what should’ve been a slam dunk port with how much effort went into translating the visuals and everything else over.

The major issues are with the cuts to DLC. Not only are the DLC characters not included in the game right now, but the collaboration characters are completely cut out. As an example, Baiken from Guilty Gear or Warden from For Honor are completely absent here. Not having DLC right from the start isn’t the biggest problem, but the current character selection screen mentions some of the DLC characters arriving as late as July 2024. I get that you want people to remain subscribed to Netflix so you don’t want to release everything in one go, but this is a bit much.

If you’ve never played Samurai Shodown on other platforms or don’t even care about those versions, Samurai Shodown on Netflix isn’t a complete waste. The touch controls aren’t as good as traditional controls on a controller or stick, but the developers did a good job with them here. I just don’t understand why it didn’t include controller support as an option for those who prefer using traditional controls in a fighting game.

For the online, I tested against someone locally over wifi and with Shaun who is in Japan. The netcode held up alright, but it isn’t as good as playing something like Street Fighter 6 or Guilty Gear Strive. For casual matches, it is worth trying, and also has a decent custom lobby implementation. There are also leaderboards for some modes included in the Netflix version of Samurai Shodown.

When it comes to platform differences, the best versions of Samurai Shodown right now for me are the Xbox Series X version for playing on TV and the Steam Deck version for playing on the go. The Xbox Series X version supports 120hz which even the PC version doesn’t have. The PS4 version never got any PS5 enhancements so I stopped playing that version to move to the Xbox version for offline play. On the portable side, I would only recommend the Switch version if you have no other way to play Samurai Shodown and don’t care about online play.

So where does the Netflix version fit into this picture? It isn’t really the same experience with forced touch controls, but it does a better job than the Switch port for sure. I would absolutely recommend downloading it to see how you find the touch controls, but I really hope SNK can add controller support and improve the DLC situation. I don’t expect online to work too well considering the console and PC versions still don’t have decent online netcode. That is coming this month. But in the testing I did, it is serviceable. I played a few games against Shaun who is in Japan and it wasn’t unplayable like certain Switch fighting games we’ve played.

Samurai Shodown, even as the base game with touch controls only, is a great addition to Netflix’s gaming catalog, but it should’ve been better. The lack of controller support and baffling DLC release schedule hold it back in its current state. I’m going to keep it installed in the hope we get updates to address those issues, but right now Samurai Shodown is a great fighting game that deserved better for its mobile release. This is a competent and commendable conversion in many ways, but a very disappointing one in others. Hopefully we won’t need to wait too long to embrace controller support.

What I will say is that this is, without question, the best fighting game ADK made. It’s almost frustrating, seeing how far the developer had come from the likes of the first World Heroes. Where could it have gone from here? We’ll never know. All we have is Ninja Master’s. It’s a game that shows ADK had been doing its homework, but it’s also a game that struggles from the company it was in. This game arrived in 1996, and by then SNK had a lot of irons in the fighting game fire. Between King of Fighters, Samurai Shodown, and Fatal Fury all flying high, it was at a point where the company’s new fighting game IPs were getting devoured by their own older siblings. Ninja Master’s is unfortunately no different.

The chief gimmick of this game, beyond the all-ninja cast, is that you can whip out a weapon at any time during the fight by pressing B + C at the same time. This changes the moves available to you along with various other factors, but not in such a way that your unarmed actions are rendered useless. Indeed, I would say that fighting unarmed is just as effective as using your weapon on the whole. It all comes down to how you like to play, and the situation. This blend of armed and unarmed fighting action makes it seem like ADK was trying to have its Fatal Fury and Samurai Shodown it too. In addition to this mechanic, you have the usual SNK desperation moves, super moves, super desperation moves, and so on. You can also use your meter to put yourself in a hyper state that can be pretty helpful at times.

Ninja Master’s has another somewhat unique element among SNK fighting games, though one that wasn’t unusual at the time: dial-a-combos. If you’re not familiar with that term, it refers to a combo where you can just hit all the buttons in sequence without concern for timing and the whole combo will just roll out. Some people like them, some people don’t. Tekken uses them, and it certainly has no shortage of fans. Around the time this was being made, Killer Instinct would have been doing fairly good business and it is probably one of the more well-known dial-a-combo fighters. But you didn’t see a lot of SNK games use them, so seeing them here is interesting.

Otherwise, this is just another NEOGEO fighting game, and that’s not a bad thing. You have a solid cast of varied fighters, and they’re all detailed and well-animated. The backgrounds are terrific, with lots of interesting elements to catch your eye if you have a second to look around. The medieval Japanese setting and ninja focus tie everything together so that it doesn’t feel as scattershot in a thematic sense as some other SNK fighters. The bosses here are quite wild and toppling them is certainly a challenge, but the game gives you enough leeway early on so that you can enjoy batting the CPU around a bit without too much resistance. Which, as we all know, is pretty important for these mobile releases.

I think Ninja Master’s is a pretty good one-on-one fighter, and if it had been in any other camp than SNK’s (apart from Capcom), it would probably be among the very best of that publisher’s offerings in the genre. In the SNK line-up, it has to settle for the upper mid-tier. If you enjoy the theme, you can add some extra points to the bottom line. I like the weapon gimmick, though it probably isn’t used to its maximum effectiveness. Again I can only wonder what a sequel might have brought us when the first attempt was as solid as this is. If you’re tired of spinning the usual hits, give this one a play.

Of course, when we’re talking about these mobile versions, it’s not enough to simply consider the game itself. We also have to think about how well it adapts to mobile, because that’s a different question. As usual for ACA NEOGEO releases, the only multiplayer option requires external controllers and huddling around one display. Most are probably not going to be able to make much use of that, so you’ve got a fighter you can only play in single-player. This one isn’t too shabby in that regard because the CPU isn’t a total jerk until you get near the end, but there’s no doubt something is missing by not being able to play against another human player.

The other consideration comes in the controls. If you’re sporting an external controller like a Backbone One or Kishi, you have nothing to worry about. You’ll be playing it just like anyone on other platforms can. The touch control option is a bit mixed. Some of the special moves can be tricky to pull off, and the desperation attacks are a real pain. Interestingly, that dial-a-combo system is a boon here. At least for me, it’s easier to punch in those combos via touch controls than it is to deal with a standard combo system using such means. It’s no worse off than most other SNK fighters when it comes to special move commands, but in terms of whipping out combos on those virtual buttons, I think Ninja Master’s is more manageable.

We have now reached the part of the review where I talk about the usual features for ACA NEOGEO games on mobile. You can access a variety of gameplay, video, audio, and control options. The Japanese and International versions of the game are available for standard play, plus you get Score Attack and timed Caravan modes to play. There are online leaderboards for all of these ways to play, and they do extend the entertainment value of playing a fighting game alone somewhat. The emulation quality is great, and you would expect it to be given Hamster’s extensive experience in this area by now.

Ninja Master’s suffers from most of the usual problems with the fighting games in the ACA NEOGEO line. You’re highly likely to be playing solo unless you can meet some tough requirements, and fighting games on this platform don’t exactly shine when you’re stuck fighting the CPU. Still, the unique weapon system and dial-a-combo mechanic mean that there is at least something worth noting here, and I can’t argue that the theme and cast aren’t cool and well-implemented. If you’ve been able to enjoy any of the other fighters from SNK on mobile, you might want to give this one a shot. It’s not the best of the bunch, but it’s quite good.

Congratulations! You’re the captain of your very own spiffy new tiny pirate ship. It’s not very roomy, but at least you don’t have to worry about mutinies. Since you’ve got a ship, there’s really nothing else to do but to head out onto the high seas and get to looting and pillaging. A brief yet slightly boggling tutorial will walk you through everything you can do. Swipe your finger to steer, tap the screen once to fire your cannons, and double-tap to make your ship dash. Developer, your little wordless tap animation can also be read as a swipe. It’s okay to just use words to explain how to play. The tutorial culminates in a battle with a Kraken, and no matter what you do your cool powerful ship is going to go under.

Congratulations! You’re the captain of a second, much weaker tiny pirate ship. You’re going to have to scrape up the cash if you want to get a fully decked-out ride to go take revenge on that stupid Kraken. The only way to get your hands on that loot is to take it from others. Wander around the map attacking the ships that appear, making sure to grab any crates or barrels they leave behind. There are different kinds of ships that can appear, some of whom are more than capable of hitting back, and you’ll have to deal with other non-ship hazards as well. Your starting cannon requires you to get right up in the faces of your foes, and your starting hull can only take a single hit. If you can last long enough, the Kraken might appear. Dodge its tentacles and you can take home a little bonus for your efforts. Good luck!

You’ll probably end up sinking another ship, of course. Luckily, you don’t lose this one. You can even use your ill-gotten loot to upgrade it, if you want. There are also better ships you can buy if you have enough money, each one specializing in a certain thing. Ships can be upgraded along three parameters. Armour gives you extra hit points, Sprint gives you a better boost, and Cannons increases the range of your shots. There are also several Perks you can pick up. This all costs more and more as you upgrade, so it’s quite the grind to get a nice maxed out ship.

The bigger grind comes from the new maps, though. You’ll need a ton of loot to open up the other maps, so expect to spend a fair bit of time on map one before progressing to the second and so on. You won’t be getting your revenge on that Kraken for a good long while. I understand that to an extent the grind is the game, especially given my love of role-playing games. But a long, direct grind is something you can really only get away with by carefully setting up the rest of the design, and I’m not sure Tiny Pirate Ship pulls that off perfectly.

So, first of all, I’m not super-thrilled with the controls in this game. There are times where you are going to want to be firing your cannons rapidly, but if you aren’t extremely careful you’ll end up boosting instead. Unexpectedly boosting in the middle of combat is generally not a good thing, and will result in taking a hit quite often. I’d love for these two actions to be more distinct in terms of how you activate them, perhaps making one of them on a virtual button. I think the developer was trying to avoid such things, but preserving the purity of the UI loses its nobility when it comes at the cost of the gameplay quality.

I’m also not overly satisfied with how the game’s difficulty seems to work. In addition to being a grinder, there’s also a score attack element to the game. Your highest loot haul is recorded, and there are leaderboards where you can compare with other players. Ideally then you would want to survive for as long as possible, allowing you to get a higher score. But the thing is, outside of the Kraken’s appearances, it never really feels like it’s getting any harder. It ends up feeling more like a battle of attrition, and the longer you play any given session the more boring it gets. I’m not really sure how this problem could be fixed, but endless games really do need escalation to stay interesting and I don’t get that feeling with Tiny Pirate Ship.

All that having been said, I did have fun with Tiny Pirate Ship and will likely fire it up for a round here and there in the future. That’s really how it plays best. It’s more of a toy you pull out for a few minutes, like spinning your ring on a table or something. Treat the grind as something that will eventually solve itself. Ignore the leaderboards. Just load it up, blast some ships, grab some loot, and put it away after a couple of rounds. That doesn’t fix the control issue, but that problem loses some of its punch when you’re not so fixated on surviving those long haul sessions. It’s worth the few bucks it’s asking if you’re looking for a little action game to enjoy.

Right off the hop I’ll say that despite some obvious effort going into the game’s story, I found myself getting tired of it pretty quickly. Three friends get sucked into a book, and they’ll have to battle their way through an RPG style adventure to get out. There’s dialogue between events to help flesh out the story or just crack some jokes, and while it’s decently written I just found it all to be fairly banal. At the same time, I’m not really expecting much in the story department in a game like this. It would have been nice, though.

The game is broken down into quests, which themselves involve a series of events. An event might be a battle, but it could also be a brief story scene, NPC encounter, escape sequence, and so on. Most (but not all) of these events will involve playing a word game of some sort. I’ll give the game credit here for finding a lot of interesting ways to mix up the gameplay. The standard battles are like playing Scrabble (complete with matching letter point values) on a small board. As you play, more gimmicks come into play even in these matches. There are double score squares, coins to pick up, bombs to defuse, and so on. Each word you play will deal proportional damage to the enemies, and you can match elemental types to deal extra damage. The enemies will hit back after every word you play, and you need to kill them before they kill you. Experience collected, levels gained, treasure looted, moving on. Boss battles work the same way, but they’re a bit harder.

Sometimes you do something different, though. Like sometimes you need to put down words within a set number of turns to extend the line horizontally a specific amount. Maybe you need to place words to reveal shadowed squares on the board, again with a turn limit. Sometimes the board will be divided into two different colors and you need to score a certain number of points in the areas of one specific color. You might be given a jumble of letters and have to drop single tiles to try to make as many words as possible. These word minigames are a nice diversion from the main gameplay mechanics while still using your vocabulary skills.

As you win battles, you’ll level up and even get some new equipment. Eventually you’ll be able to class change, which is something Shaun likes. If you’re feeling underleveled you can go back and re-fight earlier battles. They’ll get harder each time you win, so there is only so much grinding you’ll likely be able to do. It might make the difference, though. Individual levels don’t tip the scale too much, though. Indeed, sheer luck in which letters you’re given is probably more important than a level or two. Better equipment also helps, but nothing matches up with being able to make a word with Q or Z right out of the gate.

Not too shabby on the whole, and it’s one of those games where you can just dip in and play for a bit and then dip out as needed. I do have some problems with the game, though. The biggest problem for me is in how the actual process of playing letters works. They’re in a tray near the bottom of the screen and it is actually surprisingly tough to grab them without closing out to the home menu if you’re not careful. Similarly, it can be a bit fussy about placing them on the board. You have to drop them just so for them to stick. Luckily, placing them in the wrong space doesn’t cause any issues. You confirm once your word is in place and anything you do up until then is your business. I’d like it if the letter tiles were a bit bigger in the tray or if the tray itself was moved up a bit.

I’m not sure which dictionary the game is using for its words, but there were cases where it wouldn’t accept words I know were valid. It was rare, but it happened now and then. I’m also of two minds about the size of the board. On the one hand I can appreciate that its size forces you to play smarter, since it can be easy to clutter things up into a mess with one bad play. On the other hand, its relatively small size limits your freedom in making words to the point that you end up using a lot of smaller ones to get through without messing up the board. I have similarly split feelings about the difficulty curve. As I said, a level doesn’t really tip the scales much. If a player gets stuck, what little grinding the game allows likely won’t help much. They’ll have to just keep trying until they get lucky, and that’s not very enjoyable.

That said, even with all my little gripes, I can’t say I didn’t have fun with Tomes and Quests. I won’t say you can’t screw up a word game, because you certainly can. But there is a certain joy to flexing the old spelling bee muscles and getting a virtual pat on the head for being a smart boy like it’s elementary school again. This game builds its bones around that pleasing feeling, and while some of it could probably be done a little better, there are some things here I really appreciate. The various minigames were interesting and gave a little extra challenge. I kind of enjoyed the way the quests were set up, like little mini-episodes in a long campaign.

While Tomes and Quests isn’t up to my long-time favorite RPG/word game hybrid Letter Quest, it’s a decent spin on the concept that could be a lot better with some usability fixes and slight balance tweaking. If you love word games the way I do, you’ll likely get your money’s worth out of it. That said, it’s not quite up to the level where I’m going to shove it in everyone’s face, which is a thing I totally do sometimes. Oh, I should have used a ‘spell’ pun somewhere. Wait, my word count is up? I guess that’s it then.

One of the ways that Fatal Fury tended to distinguish itself from many other fighters, including The King of Fighters, was in its multiple lanes. Characters could jump into and out of the background in most of the games, a mechanic that perhaps never fully reached its potential but was interesting nonetheless. Indeed, one of the big changes in the original Real Bout Fatal Fury was to give that maneuver its own dedicated button, a decision which necessitated simplifying the attack button layout. Real Bout also added in a gauge that enabled counters, super specials, and powerful hidden abilities. The longer a fight dragged on, the more likely players would have access to all of these advanced techniques, stepping up the tension appropriately. It also added ring outs, which made for amusing ways to finish fights if you could set them up properly. Perhaps best of all, it was faster and more fluid than its predecessors, making for a more playable and organic fighter overall.

Real Bout was followed up by Real Bout Fatal Fury Special, pulling a trick that the original Fatal Fury sub-series did after its second installment. More returning characters were added, and the presentation got a big overhaul. Refinement was the order of the day when it came to the gameplay, and ring outs were removed. The number of lanes was reduced from three to a more sensible two, which cut down a bit on the hopping and skipping that sometimes occurs in Fatal Fury fights. Essentially, it improved on the original Real Bout in almost every way and is often considered a favorite among fans of the series for doing so.

So how about Real Bout Fatal Fury 2? In some ways it feels even less special than Special, not really doing as much work to earn that incremented digit as it perhaps could. There are two brand new characters in the roster, and lots of new stages to do battle in. Perhaps the biggest change is in how it handles the lanes. The second lane is now more of a way of temporarily evading your foe rather than a secondary arena of combat, so you basically duck in and out quickly as needed. Every fighter can now counter without any meter built up as long as the player has good timing, setting down the foundations for the parry-fest that would be seen in the next game in the series. The robust roster makes this another popular choice among series fans, as it has the largest group of distinct assembled characters.

Anyway, Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 is another one-on-one fighter where you pick your favorite character and battle against your opponents in best two-of-three round fights. Reduce your opponent’s life bar down (twice) to claim a round. Each character has an array of special moves they can pull off if you know the right combinations of directions and buttons, and the aforementioned gauge is here to enable super specials and hidden abilities. You’ve got four buttons in front of you. One does a regular punch, one does a regular kick, one does a strong attack whose form varies from character to character, and the last is for slipping into that other lane.

You’ll most likely be partaking of the standard mode here, which sees you battling a series of fighters until you reach the boss. The game is obviously at its best if you play against another human player, but you’re going to need some extra controllers to have access to that in this mobile version. Indeed, an extra controller is strongly recommended here. Some of the special moves in Real Bout Fatal Fury 2 are nigh impossible to pull off with the provided touch controls, and even if you can do them it’s a lot easier and more enjoyable to use the actual stick and button controls the game was built for. You might still have a decent time thrashing away at the CPU without a controller, and I will say that the CPU in this game is gentler for the most part than previous entries. But it’s not ideal by any means.

It’s somewhat vexing, really. The games the NEOGEO was best known for, fighting games and Metal Slug, are probably the least ideal for the default mobile ACA NEOGEO status quo. Precise directional movements, button combinations, a multiplayer emphasis, a minimal focus on score… all of these things are the Achilles’ Heel of the set-up we have here. If you have a controller then some of that is mitigated, but multiplayer remains cumbersome thanks to a lack of online or local wireless implementation. The added modes are aimed at score attacking, and that’s not the most entertaining thing to do with a fighting game. Well, it is what it is.

Anyway, all the usual ACA NEOGEO stuff applies here. You have access to lots of options, there are online leaderboards, you can play the Japanese or overseas release, and there are the usual additional modes that allow you to take on a score challenge or see how many points you can rack up in a set amount of time. You can use external controllers or you can fly with the touch controls. Your call. The emulation is top shelf, as one would expect from the folks at Hamster by now.

It all comes down to two points with Real Bout Fatal Fury 2. First, this is a great fighting game and, along with Garou: Mark of the Wolves, the peak of one of the better franchises in the genre. If you dig playing one-on-one fighters on your mobile device, you won’t be unhappy with this one. Excellent stuff. Second, I don’t think one-on-one fighters really work that well on mobile, or at least not in the way that Hamster does things. Can you get sixteen quarters’ worth of fun out of it anyway? Probably, but I continue to wish that these releases could do more to make multiplayer easier.

I’ve been playing LEGO 2K Drive on Steam Deck and also on Xbox Series X, and I’ve been impressed with a lot of aspects of it, but let down by a few elements in its current state. Having recently played Disney Speedstorm, I wasn’t too thrilled about more free-to-play elements in a racing game, but I will get to those in a bit. LEGO 2K Drive feels like it takes the best bits of Forza Horizon’s structure, Sonic Racing’s kart racing, and the charm of a few notable LEGO brick themes and settings.

LEGO 2K Drive has the option to play solo, play with friends, and play with everyone. The play with friends option lets you invite your friends to play together while the play with everyone option has matchmaking. The playing solo or just play option lets you play the story mode, the cup series, a quick race, and mini-games. LEGO 2K Drive’s story mode is the highlight of the experience with its humor, exploration, and challenges.

The actual racing feels very good. If you’ve played any recent kart racer, you know what to expect. The drifting, skills, and track layouts are very well put together, which makes the monetization aspect even more annoying. This should’ve been a game I can recommend to any LEGO fan rather than one that has caveats attached to it in its current state. It is a full-priced release with two higher-priced editions that still has a battle pass with a premium option and a cosmetics menu that’s straight out of Fall Guys or Fortnite. These shouldn’t be in a game like this. If that’s how it was designed, it shouldn’t be a full-priced release.

LEGO 2K Drive on PC lets you adjust resolution scale, frame rate (up to 120fps), interface scale, toggle v-sync, motion blur, and choose DirectX version in the default video settings. The advanced menu lets you choose different presets and adjust anti-aliasing, texture quality, shadow quality, post-processing quality, effects detail, foliage detail, and draw distance. I used a mix of mostly medium settings with some low and some high settings. I got a good compromise to hit 40fps (with 40hz refresh rate) during online races, story, and local play.

When I booted up LEGO 2K Drive on Steam Deck after downloading the review build pre-release, I was pleasantly surprised at how well it looked and ran on Steam Deck out of the box. After a bit of tweaking, it looked great and ran very well targeting 60fps in parts, but things vary quite a bit depending on the map. Opting for even the medium preset at native resolution sees drops into the 40s in maps like Dusty Devil Run. You can opt for 40hz to save battery life if you’d prefer, but you could also opt to play at a lower resolution for a smoother frame rate.

Visually, it runs at 16:10 during gameplay and 16:9 in the menus and interface. Since all versions (PS5, PS4, all Xbox consoles, and PC) barring Switch support cross play online, I tested this out on Steam Deck. The online worked without issues on Steam Deck and I got matched instantly at different times of the day. I specifically waited for the game’s launch to see how the online would hold up and to see the in-game shop for this reason.

LEGO games usually have great audio design, and LEGO 2K Drive delivers on that front. It has good music in and out of races and very good voiced dialogue. The only issue I have is the voiced dialogue around the store. It is a bit too grating. I also like the use of rumble on Steam Deck to complement things.

I know it likely won’t be possible, but I’d love an option to just disable the in-game shop completely in LEGO 2K Drive. Even owning the most expensive edition isn’t enough here and it feels like a massive grind if you want something specific with the rotation in the shop. I’m also annoyed at the inability of the game to launch when offline on Steam Deck. It crashes before getting you into the game if you try to boot up and load your game when offline. I tested this across Proton versions.

LEGO 2K Drive is an excellent blend of Forza Horizon, Sonic Racing, and LEGO, but one that unfortunately also has some of the bad aspects of free-to-play games included. Had LEGO 2K Drive been a free game, this wouldn’t be a problem, but it is a full-priced game with more expensive editions available. I’m looking forward to seeing how it evolves over time, but right now it is a very good game held back by its monetization.

LEGO 2K Drive Steam Deck Score: 3.5/5

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Way back around the turn of the millennium, console gamers were suffering from a rare (at the time) bit of PC gaming envy. Sure, we had our fancy new PlayStation 2 consoles. They could launch missiles and make Toy Story graphics, which was all well and good if you were looking to take out Woody before Toy Story 4 could happen. But over on the PC side of the line, our gaming counterparts were not only enjoying their sweet first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, but also some really awesome role-playing games. For those who liked the thinkier sort, the Baldur’s Gate games were knocking off chainmail socks. Meanwhile, those who craved a bit more of an active experience with a healthy side dish of multiplayer fun had the incredibly fancy dining of Diablo II. What did we have? Summoner? Yeesh.

But what if… a publisher were to make a console Diablo-style game and disguise it as a Baldur’s Gate? Oh ho ho ho ho! Delightfully devilish, Interplay. With one well-aimed game, Interplay could pull in both the people who wanted Diablo on their PlayStation 2 and those pining for a console version of Baldur’s Gate. And yes, by all accounts the game was extremely successful. It reviewed well, it got ported everywhere it could be (and even some places it couldn’t be, what’s up, surprisingly decent Game Boy Advance version), and it sold over a million copies in an era where that meant you made money instead of losing it. It got a direct sequel by another developer that didn’t sell as well. It got a spiritual follow-up by the same developer and that didn’t go well either. That first game was just in the right place at the right time, it seems.

And now here we are in 2023. Is this once again the right place at the right time? You know, it just might be. Mobile gamers finally got Diablo in the form of Diablo Immortal, and I have to believe most of us have had enough time with it now for the honeymoon to be well and truly over. Dungeon Hunter 5 is still around and continues the series tradition of being a decent discount Diablo, but it is also free-to-play’d up the wazoo. Torchlight: Infinite? Buddy, I don’t want to worry about Gems, Orbs, Primocryst, or Season Passes. I just want to smack some skeletons with my Club +1 of Bonking and maybe find a new hat. I want a freaking ending. Why is this so much to ask for?

So here is Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, coming from the past to save us from the future present. It has no IAP or season passes. It’s just a simple, no-nonsense action-RPG where things explode into piles of gold. It has a story, one that won’t string you along for five years or whatever until the game gets the axe and everything has to be buttoned up in a single update. It has water that looks really great for 2001. Seriously! Look at that water! That was what set hearts a-flutter back in the day, I tell you. We were really into water for a bit there. Ask Nintendo.

One of the other cool things about the game back in the day was that you could play it in multiplayer, but you’re going to live without that here. That has one unintended outcome, but I’ll get to that in a bit. The game is certainly playable and enjoyable solo. Pick your favorite character from the three available, and venture forth. Don’t sweat too much about who to pick, you can pretty much flatten their differences if you’re not happy with their natural tendencies. You also get to pick your difficulty. You can choose from four; I recommend Easy to start but you can do what you like. Fair warning, this game is pretty tough. Tougher with touch controls. If you have an external controller, you’ll probably have a better time with that.

You’ll find yourself in the scenic town of Baldur’s Gate, and things go well right off the hop. You’re given a fantastic investment opportunity that you simply can’t refuse, and like all those NFT purchases you made last year, I’m sure you’ll see that money again someday. But for now, you’re not exactly liquid. You head to a tavern for some assistance, get roped into a bit of pest disposal, and your grand adventure begins. You can talk with some NPCs and make the odd conversation choice, but don’t expect this to be like those other Baldur’s Gate games. It’s not. Action all the way up and down those sewers. The story ramps up in a hurry, though it mostly consists of narratively pointing at the next mess of enemies you’ll have to slice and/or fry your way out of.

There are a few things to know about this quest. First, it does in places feel tuned for multiplayer. That doesn’t mean you can’t win alone, but you’ll have to be smart. Second, you’re not going to be able to grind your way out of messes. There was a bit of chicanery you could pull in the console versions with other players to allow you to grind, but when you’re flying solo there are set amounts of enemies, treasures, and other objects. Once they’re gone, they aren’t coming back. As long as you kill everything, you won’t ever be underleveled, but you’re never going to be overleveled either. And the other thing I have to mention is that this game has some platforming. It’s dreadful, and it’s even worse with touch controls than it is on a controller. And pal, it’s pretty bad on a controller.

In a lot of ways, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance is going to scratch your itch for a Diablo-like game on mobile. It has the random loot with colorful names. Lots of baddies and barrels to bash. You can quaff those health and mana potions like you chugged Big Slam Pepsis back in high school. It’s fun. Really, really fun most of the time. The times when that slips, it can be absolutely miserable. I really can’t stress enough how annoying the platforming can be, and there are a couple of bosses that be can really nasty too. Even on Easy. Be persistent, you’ll get there. The last boss is worth it.

It’s not quite Diablo though, and it never was. It was Diablo-lite; sitting somewhere between its obvious source of inspiration and the arcade-style affairs like Gauntlet. There’s a reason this series and its spawn petered out so quickly. Once you have the real thing, this just doesn’t quite cut it anymore. I’ve mentioned my misgivings with Diablo Immortal before, but I also did so while admitting it was a very enjoyable, slick game. That big oomph effort from veterans of the trade, throwing all their money and modern game design knowledge into a release designed to soak up money like a gelatinous cube soaks up treasure, is a very strong game. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance is a good port of a decent game from an era before we knew the blessings of even Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man. It can’t compete in most little ways and even a lot of big ways.

But there is a purity to it, being from that era. It isn’t trying to sell you gems at every turn. It has no DLC or any intentions of such. No unlockable skins or guest characters. You can log in every day and you will have nothing extra to show for it. Here is the game. Here is the adventure. Here is the ending. Thank you for your ten dollars (Er, um, five dollars if you happen to catch its very-soon-after-release sale price–Ed). That’s kind of lovely, even if there are a lot of parts of it that aren’t. It might be the tonic you’re looking for right now, because we frankly don’t see a lot of things like this on mobile anymore. I hope it is followed up with its sequel, as I tend to think of that as a more well-rounded game, but if this be it? I’m glad it’s here.

So yes, this is a late 1999 NEOGEO game. One of the last before SNK was swallowed up by pachinko company Aruze and went into perhaps its darkest era. Prehistoric Isle 2 is one of the last non-fighting, non-Metal Slug games SNK released on the system. By this point the system was very mature, which meant a couple of things. First of all, SNK’s developers (Saurus and Yumekobo in this case) had a pretty good handle on the hardware. Second, the system had fallen woefully behind the competition in terms of pure processing power. SNK must have taken notes for what Nintendo did in a similar situation, because Prehistoric Isle 2 uses a ton of prerendered CG for its visuals, often using it to create a faux-3D look that was mildly impressive at the time but is more than a little obvious today.

Prehistoric Isle fans were likely disappointed, though. This sequel really doesn’t share much with the original game aside from also being a side-scrolling shooter where you fight dinosaurs. The original game bit pretty hard off of R-Type for its core mechanics, but by 1999 that wouldn’t have been very trendy anymore. Instead, the follow-up takes some cues from the popular Cave shooters of the era for its power-ups and basic gameplay. You have two different helicopters to choose from, each with their own basic shot type and limited bomb attacks. You can tap the fire button for concentrated more powerful shots, or hold it down for continuous shots that fan out more but deal less damage.

As for the power-ups, they can be picked up from destroyed crates or from people you manage to rescue. They’ll switch you between a few different kinds of weapons which can in turn be leveled up. You can also add missiles to your arsenal and pick up additional bombs. Prehistoric Isle 2 is a bit lenient in one sense. Instead of a stock of lives, you have a life bar that can take five hits before you die. You can even find rare health pick-ups to restore a portion of the meter if you’re very lucky. If you continue, you’ll be dropped right where you left off. It’s an easy game to coin feed through if you want to, in other words.

Taking hits has its costs, though. Each hit downgrades your weapon by one level, and if you’re carrying any rescued people you’ll lose them. Some enemies drop stars that will give you extra points at the end of the stage, but continuing wipes out your whole stock. If you want to maximize your score, you need to collect and keep as many stars as possible, rescue as many people as possible by escorting them to a helicopter that will take them away, and max out your weapon level to activate a temporary score multiplier.

This can be a little tricky because the regular enemies are sometimes bullet sponges, generally appear in large numbers, and love to rain holy hell down on you with their bullets. The bosses by comparison are surprisingly easy to deal with. Their patterns aren’t too tricky and as long as you’re patient they will eventually go down. There are six stages in all and some of the bosses can take more punishment than others, and the last boss in particular is a rather memorable set of encounters. All in all, this game is enough of a silly spectacle that less skilled players can probably enjoy credit-feeding their way through, while the scoring mechanics are deep enough that those who want to dig deeper will unearth something for their efforts.

The biggest problem with Prehistoric Isle 2 is that it just doesn’t have much going for it beyond its unique theme. There’s no defining mechanic here, so it ends up feeling like a very generic shooting experience. Given how late in the game this title arrived, it’s disappointing how plain it feels to play. That said, it’s not bad either. It rides that middle line very closely, perhaps content to lean on its visual punch to carry it through. I’ll grant that it can sometimes be very pretty for what it is. The dinosaurs and other monsters look rather plastic, but the backgrounds often carry a depth and life that you don’t often see in SNK’s shooters. Certainly worth the ride at least once just to see it all.

After that one trip around the proverbial town, it falls to Hamster’s usual tricks to extend the game’s life. Score Attack and Caravan Mode both shine nicely here thanks to just how many scoring opportunities are present in the game. You always feel like there’s room to notch a higher score, which is a nice source of replay value for a game that otherwise lacks it. You can also choose between the Japanese or overseas version of the game to play, though it doesn’t make much difference in this case. Shooters take very well to these kinds of extra modes, so if you love the high score chase then you’ll have things to do here.

Prehistoric Isle 2 plays fairly well with touch controls, though you also have the usual option to use an external controller. You can bring in a second player through external controllers as well, and that does add some spice to the game. Half of the fun in this silly game is in the content tourism, and it’s always more enjoyable to take a trip with a friend. I wish there was some kind of online or wireless multiplayer option, but I’ve been banging this drum for a while and don’t expect anything to change there. Fortunately, the rest of the options haven’t changed either; you have access to just about all of the settings you could ever ask for to mess about with to your heart’s content.

What else can be said? There are better shoot-em-ups on the NEOGEO and we’ve seen a couple of them in the ACA NEOGEO line. There are also some worse ones, and we’ve seen a couple of those too. But I’ll say this: none of them look quite like Prehistoric Isle 2 does. It’s very much of its time and place, and that dated nature has a charm to it. Nothing on the NEOGEO looks quite like it. The sheer zing of that visual presentation helps what is otherwise an aggressively average shooter, and Hamster’s usual fine work makes it shine the best it can in the present era. Worth a spin if you’re looking to shoot some dinos on your mobile device, at least.

Of all of SNK’s NEOGEO beat-em-up attempts, Sengoku was the one that had the greatest reception with coin-dropping arcade-goers around the world. Despite having some slightly stiff controls, the compelling premise, character-swapping mechanic, and excellent presentation attracted plenty of players in the early era of the NEOGEO. Critical reviews were less kind, but that didn’t seem to hold the game back in the least. With the development team given the nod to do a sequel, one could only imagine how the ante would be upped.

Time travel. In contrast to other forms of media, time travel rarely goes wrong in video games. We love that stuff. Chrono Trigger. Turtles in Time. Ocarina of Time. Day of the Tentacle. Blinx the Time Sweeper. Nothing but legends there. Add in the fact that beat-em-ups lean heavier than most genres on a flashy attention-grabbing premise, and time travel is a full-on winning play. So when the feudal warlord returns in Sengoku 2, he doesn’t just attack modern-day Washington again. No, this time he’s going to attack and take over several major moments in history. Ninja Dave and Cowboy Kev, with the help of a priestess, will travel through time to battle the forces of the warlord wherever they pop up.

The gameplay doesn’t have a whole ton of changes from the first. The multiple weapons of the original game are gone, which is kind of unfortunate. Instead, you start with a sword that you’ll always wield. You can do high and low attacks with your weapon, and by pushing both at the same time you’ll block. Orbs can be picked up as before, but this time they’ll just upgrade your attacks. The character transformations return, but this time you start the game with all three available. Choices include a doggo, a tengu with a lengthy rod weapon, and the world’s worst-dressed ninja. You can transform into them temporarily, and the tengu in particular is very useful. It’s as fun of a gimmick as it was in the first, though occasionally just as pointless.

It’s still fairly stiff compared to the offerings of Capcom, Konami, and even Jaleco, with a lack of fun combos and chain moves. That said, it’s a faster and smoother game than its predecessor, making for an overall more enjoyable experience. There are also some horse-riding sections in the game that help add a little sizzle to the oft-repetitive slicing and dicing of the standard gameplay. It’s also improved from a presentation standpoint, with better animation, more intimidating enemies, and some wild stage backdrops as you get tossed around in time. There’s no question which of the two games is superior; Sengoku 2 handily bests the original game.

I won’t beat around the bush too much longer, however. Sengoku 2 is not a great beat-em-up. It’s barely a good one. I wouldn’t say this series had a truly excellent installment until its third and final outing. But Sengoku 2 is good enough. A fun little diversion to run through on your mobile device with however many credits you choose to use. The game is more fun with a friend, but as is the norm with these ACA NEOGEO mobile releases, you’re probably not going to have everything you need to make that happen.

On that note, let’s talk about the usual stuff. You can use an external controller if you have one, and that’s a fine way to play. If you’re stuck with touch controls, you’ll still have a decent time with it. Beat-em-ups generally seem to handle well enough with touch controls and this is no exception. You get the same extra modes as we’ve seen in other ACA NEOGEO releases, and the same robust array of options to choose from. Online leaderboards give you an extra incentive to keep coming back and are a most welcome feature.

If you enjoyed playing through Sengoku on iOS, this is an easy recommendation. Sengoku 2 is a better game than the first and its conversion for mobile has been handled in a similarly competent fashion. I still wouldn’t call it a particularly amazing title, but slashing your way through its bizarre and beautiful locales is a pleasing enough use of your time and virtual coins. Here’s hoping we won’t have to wait another year for the superb follow-up to make its appearance in the ACA NEOGEO line.

That makes the existence of Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy ($3.99) a bit of a rarity. Developed internally at SNK by ex-IREM staffers, the game arrived in the summer of 1994 alongside The King of Fighters ’94. One of those games became near-legendary, carving its legacy into the very platform in an indelible way. The other was Top Hunter. A quirky little platformer/beat-em-up hybrid for one or two players, one could generously say that it paved the way for Metal Slug in some small way.

While there is no significant shared staff between Top Hunter and Metal Slug, there are some common elements. The visual style has that same sort of silly-but-gritty feel to it, and there are plenty of amusing enemy animations. You can find vehicles to ride on, and you’ll sometimes get your hands on a gun. Platforming is largely perfunctory, with jumping mostly being used to avoid attacks rather than navigating harrowing platforms. Stages are capped off with a boss fight, usually against some kind of large opponent. That’s about all of the shared aspects.

There are two key mechanics to Top Hunter. The first is your stretchy arms, which allow you to grab a variety of objects and either smash them or toss them. You can also use them to work various machines, switches, and so on. You’ll generally defeat foes by smacking them or throwing something at them, but you can make use of some traps and some special moves for a little variety. The other gimmick is that every stage has two planes, and you can hop between them as needed or desired. Sometimes traps or power-ups need to be accessed from the opposite plane, encouraging you to swap regularly.

I’ll be frank: there were a few platformers in this era that tried this kind of thing, and I don’t feel like any of them were substantially better for it. Probably the best of the bunch was Wario Land for the Virtual Boy, and there’s a reason for that. The 3D effect of the console helped solve a problem that seems to be inherent to this kind of design. Namely, it can be difficult at times to tell which plane a given object is on. In this game, it can make it hard to line up throws and even occasionally result in taking a hit you didn’t think was going to hit you. The art style here makes things a bit worse as little is done to distinguish the planes visually.

Well, it’s not a huge deal. A bigger problem with Top Hunter is that it too frequently lacks tension. This is an unusually easy game for an arcade platformer, and once you’ve got the hang of things you can go ridiculously far on each credit. The enemies just don’t pose much of a threat to your extremely versatile and powerful character. There also aren’t enough enemy types, so you’ll start seeing the same faces again and again. It’s amusing to mess around with everything and try defeating enemies in different ways, but ultimately Top Hunter is a little boring.

This boredom can be alleviated somewhat by bringing a friend along for some good old-fashioned co-op mayhem, but this is of course an ACA NEOGEO release for mobile. That means you’ll only be able to play multiplayer if you have some external controllers and don’t mind huddling around your mobile device of choice. I’d imagine for most people, that’s not going to be the typical play experience with this game. You’re most likely going to be playing solo, and that’s the less fun way to go about experiencing Top Hunter.

It does however benefit from the fact that we don’t get too many high-quality, premium games of this kind on mobile. I’d say it takes to touch controls even better than the Metal Slug games do since you don’t have to worry about precise aiming as much. I suppose as a solo experience, it takes to mobile better than some NEOGEO games do. And I do want to stress that the game isn’t a half-effort by any means. It’s quite gorgeous in that way NEOGEO games tended to be, and each of the four worlds have a distinct look to them. You get three levels in each world, plus a rather climactic final stage. If you play the included Japanese version, there are even some secret endings to find. It may not be thrills every minute, but it certainly brings the value.

As this is part of the ACA NEOGEO line, the expected extras and options are all here. You can play with an external controller, you get both regional versions of the game, there are extra modes with their own online leaderboards, and you’ve got more options than you can shake a stick at. The emulation quality is good, and my only gripes about Hamster’s part in all of this are my usual ones about not having online multiplayer or the MVS version as an option. It’s a great package, and it’s a bit luxurious that I’m pretty much used to this level of quality in such a low-cost release.

I’m not the biggest fan of Top Hunter: Roddy & Cathy, but it’s a decent enough romp that clearly had a lot of care put into it. A little too easy and repetitive at times, and I’m not sure its dual-plane system works as well as it should, but for a few bucks you’ll get your fun out of it. Add in the usual suite of features that comes with Hamster’s ACA NEOGEO line, and you have a pleasant distraction for a lazy weekend afternoon.

The answer to that question is, unfortunately, mostly a no. On the positive side of things, you’ve got a wide array of characters to choose from and can pick whichever pilot you like in single-player. There are also quite a few stages, with the branching nature of progression in the game giving it an extra bit of replay value. Some of the characters can now charge up their basic weapon, which adds an extra style of play to the game. There are a few interesting and very amusing secrets to find. It’s a competent game in most respects, and it hasn’t lost that bizarre sense of humor that made the previous game so memorable.

The biggest failing of Aero Fighters 3 is in the brevity of its stages. Some of them barely get going before the boss arrives, and they’re all conspicuously short. The bosses are a bit longer, with almost all of them taking on multiple forms until they finally go down. The patterns run on the basic side, and few of them have any truly interesting gimmicks. A complete run will take you through eight stages, with a few of them being bonus rounds. So yes, not very long or interesting, and you’ll be spending almost as much time fighting bosses as you will traveling through stages.

A clever scoring system can save many shooting games in similar circumstances, but while Aero Fighters 3 does have a bit more to chew on in that regard compared to the second game, it’s not especially intriguing. Defeat enemies, avoid getting killed, pick up bonus point items when they crop up, and try to hold on to your powered-up state so subsequent power-ups will just give extra points. You’ll also want to learn which routes have the most potential for higher scoring and take those. It’s not nothing, but it’s also not really good or unique enough to elevate the game.

What does elevate it somewhat is the same thing that helped the previous game so much: the humor. Your chosen character will make comments as you progress through the game, and each solo character and team has a unique ending, most of which are ridiculous. The Russian team of Spanky the Dolphin and the twin sisters Chaika and Pooshika, for example, have an ending where the ladies are wondering just how a dolphin flies an airplane. It then cuts to Spanky complaining about the heat and removing his head, which is now obviously a costume, revealing a strange-looking guy underneath. There’s a lot of strange jokes like this in the game, and it makes you want to clear the game with everyone just to see them all.

The other way this follow-up loses something compared to its predecessor is less consequential for this mobile version, but it does bear mentioning. Aero Fighters 2 allowed two players to mix and match characters from different countries, but Aero Fighters 3 forces both players to use characters from the same country. This significantly cuts back on the number of potential endings, which is probably why the developers did it, but it also cuts back on the flexibility in building teams. But in this mobile version, you can only play with a second player if you have external controllers anyway, so it is not likely to be a factor for many of you.

While we’re here, let’s cover the usual checklist of points about Arcade Archives mobile releases. You get the usual array of modes, with both international and Japanese versions of the game available along with a Score Attack and Caravan Mode to play. There are online leaderboards for you to compare with others on, essential in this kind of game. The game features support for external controllers, though like the previous game the touch controls work perfectly fine here. You also get the usual array of options, including difficulty toggles, video settings, control mappings, and audio settings. Naturally, the emulation is as high quality as ever. Hamster has NEOGEO down to a science by now.

Aero Fighters 3 isn’t quite the game that Aero Fighters 2 is, but it’s still a decent enough shoot-em-up romp to be of interest to genre fans at this price. The goofy humor helps it stand out from the crowd, and having so many different characters to use adds greatly to the replay value. If the levels were a little longer and the bosses a little more interesting, this would have been a better experience all around. But it is what it is, and Hamster has done its typically fine job in adapting it for mobile devices. For the price, it’ll do.

Unlike many of the games we’ve seen in the ACA NEOGEO line-up so far, Twinkle Star Sprites arrived several years into the life of SNK’s console. It was a 1996 release, and it would end up being the final game released on the system by developer ADK before they moved on to supporting SNK’s handheld NEOGEO Pocket. It’s an unusual game to be sure, but it’s not hard to see what inspired it. Shoot-em-ups were always reliable earners in arcades, and competitive puzzle games had caught fire in the wake of Puyo Puyo. Why not try to combine them?

Thus, the competitive shoot-em-up was born. At least, I think this is where it was born. It’s certainly the first one of its type that I remember seeing, and it’s an idea that took some time for me to warm up to. Shooters usually see you making your way through carefully planned stages, grabbing power-ups, blasting everything in sight, and taking down huge bosses. Sometimes the aim is to reach an ending, but usually it’s about racking up a high score. If there does happen to be multiplayer support, it’s typically in the form of having another player jump in and help out.

Twinkle Star Sprites tosses each player into their own half of the screen. The players have to blast away the enemies in usual fashion, with a basic shot, charge shot, and limited stock of bombs serving as the main tools for doing so. But there’s no end to the stage or final boss waiting for you. No, your enemy is the other player. By blasting away enemies in chains, you’ll send attacks over to the other field. If they hit the player, they’ll take damage. Naturally, the enemies can also deal damage. Whoever runs out of life first loses, but the final hit can only come from the other player.

The really fun bit is that you can hit the attacks your opponent sends over to your screen, and by doing so you will send them back with a little extra mustard on them. After a few volleys, the attacks start getting really nasty, spawning invincible enemies and even bosses. Take too long to win and Death will appear, but even Death can be bounced over to your foe’s side of the screen. It’s wild stuff, and if you have two well-matched players the matches can get absolutely chaotic in all the best ways.

And that, my friends, is wherein the rub lies. Twinkle Star Sprites has single-player modes, and they’re as extensive as any arcade head-to-head puzzler’s are. But the real meat of the game is in that multiplayer mode, as the CPU can never be as fun to play against as another human player. While you can play the mobile ACA NEOGEO games with two players, you ideally need a couple of external controllers to do so. There is no wireless multiplayer or online multiplayer option available here, and you obviously can’t both use touch controls on one device. It really does hurt the appeal of this game.

It’s the usual set of options and extras from Hamster, in other words. Decent touch controls that work fairly well with the kind of game this is. External controller support for those who prefer that way and have the means. Tons of video, audio, control, and difficulty options to tweak to your liking. Additional modes that allow you test yourself against others on the online leaderboards. Your choice of the Japanese or Overseas versions of the game. A solid package all-around for this lovely little game, and the price is certainly more than fair.

Twinkle Star Sprites plays well on mobile in the mechanical sense. The controls work well enough, it’s running as smoothly as it ever did, and you have a wide array of options and features. With that said, similar to the fighting games that have been brought to the mobile ACA NEOGEO line, the relatively complicated and specific means of playing with another human really does a number on the appeal of this game. Can you still have fun with Twinkle Star Sprites solo? Sure. Maybe even enough to justify dropping the handful of coins to buy it. But this certainly isn’t the optimal way to enjoy everything this game has to offer.

It’s a tale as old as time, as far as the game industry goes. A mad scientist creates an army of robots and tries to take over the world, and I guess Mega Man is busy or something because two robot warriors have been dispatched to take care of him and rescue the civilians he’s captured. They’ll have to battle their way through the mad scientist’s robo army (title drop!) which consists of a variety of mechanical creations. There are six stages in total, taking you through various grim and gritty locales. Unlike many other games in the beat-em-up genre, you don’t have a choice of characters. Player One is always Red Guy With A Human Face, and Player Two is always Blue Guy With A Robot Face.

Robo Army was developed by many of the same people behind the Art of Fighting and Fatal Fury games, but it doesn’t have anywhere near their ambition. Scratch past the theme and you’ll find Robo Army is about as plain a brawler as you could find. You have some basic attack combos, a back attack, a jump, and a special move button whose effect varies based on how full your special gauge is. You can grapple enemies and deal extra damage to them, too. Enemies will sometimes leave behind their arms or pipes when you defeat them, and you can use those as weapons. You’ll also find life pick-ups, energy pick-ups, and a special item that will make you temporarily transform into an invincible car that can run over enemies.

That’s pretty much the extent of things. For a 1991 NEOGEO game, Robo Army is surprisingly free of gimmicky displays of the hardware’s power. You’ll get the occasional scaling sprite when things come in from the background, but most of the NEOGEO’s muscle is being used to keep things moving smoothly with multiple, sometimes large, characters on-screen. The visuals look decent enough, and you get some fun clang-and-crash sound effects as you scrape your metal fists against the enemies’ metal jaws. It’s not an exceptionally lush game for its era or anything, but it’s good enough. The sense of impact of your strikes is a bit better than in Burning Fight, and seeing the enemies break apart certainly helps to sell your hits. There are also a few amusing animations, like when a car-robot decides to chew on you a bit with its hood.

Robot Army is a totally serviceable beat-em-up, and if the theme does something for you, then you’ll find it an enjoyable enough romp to fire up here and there. But it never really goes beyond that, and smacking a robot about the head with its buddy’s arm will eventually lose its charm after a while. A very long while, mind you. I mean, that’s absolutely hilarious. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire game was greenlit on that specific part of the pitch. But eventually that thrill will fade, and all you’ll be left with is a Jaleco-tier brawler with more pans-banging-together sound effects. Something good enough to toss a few quarters into while you’re waiting for your clothes to dry, but not good enough to remember after you’re done folding them.

The nice thing about Hamster is that the company has room in its heart for games like that in addition to the big hits, though. I’ve done many of these reviews by now, but I’ve never really stopped to mention how nice it is to see SNK and Hamster walking outside the lines of the usual hits that get mobile ports. The SNK of the past would have done the Metal Slugs, King of Fighters, Samurai Shodowns, and a few other odds and ends and called it a day. In fact, that is exactly what they did. We’re now in a reality where we are getting high quality releases of some really obscure games that relatively few people care about, and from both a presentation and variety standpoint, I think that’s great.

By now, the features of the wrapper for these games are known quantities. Controller support? Yes, and through that, support for local multiplayer. Save states, check. A variety of options for adjusting video, audio, difficulty, and controls. Online leaderboards and the usual Caravan and Score Attack modes. Japanese and Overseas versions of the game. If you don’t have an external controller, this is one of those games that plays just fine using the touch controls. I’ll go ahead and insert my usual gripes about not being able to play multiplayer online, but that’s really all I’ve got to complain about with regards to Hamster’s handling of things.

If you’re looking for another average beat-em-up to add to your pile, have very specific happy memories of Nick Arcade, or just gotta catch ’em all with the ACA NEOGEO series, you won’t have a bad time with Robo Army. It has a fun theme that it executes well, and that goes a long way to hiding the actual bread-and-butter game that it is. It plays well enough on mobile, and I cannot stress enough that you get to pick up robot arms and beat other robots with them. If that isn’t worth four bucks, what is?

Dragon Quest Builders is set in the world of the first Dragon Quest game where you play as a builder aiming to rebuild the world after it has been destroyed by the Dragonlord. What made Dragon Quest Builders special for me when I originally played it, is how it perfectly took the aspects of Minecraft I enjoyed, and blended those in with Dragon Quest storytelling, writing, enemies, and more. I haven’t bothered playing much of Minecraft with Dragon Quest Builders and Dragon Quest Builders 2 available on most platforms I own. These games are that good and add enough direction and mechanics to engage me unlike Minecraft where I never got sucked into it as much.

Structurally Dragon Quest Builders is a bit weird initially. Progression is reset to some degree in each chapter location. You aren’t redoing everything again like the first chapter, but it isn’t a continuous grand adventure like you’d expect in a Dragon Quest game. The chapters here are massive, and I honestly was pleased with the game just after the first chapter back on PS4, with how much time I put into it. This isn’t a huge issue, but you’re better off knowing this before jumping in and spending a lot of time thinking everything you build here will carry into the next chapter which is essentially a new settlement map. I’d also recommend making a different manual save per chapter for this reason.

Let’s get this out of the way. Dragon Quest Builders has basically no controller support on iOS. You can pair a controller and use the analog stick to move, but the only other button that works is the options button on a PS4/PS5 controller that is mapped to jump. Nothing else on the controller works. There is some silver lining though. Square Enix has done a fantastic job with the touch controls on iPhone specifically. On iPad, they aren’t as good, but I will get to the iPad issues in a bit. The combination of great touch controls for iPhone and the new features added make this the best version of the original Dragon Quest Builders, with a few big caveats.

Having played Dragon Quest Builders on PS4, PS Vita, and Nintendo Switch before, I was excited to revisit it on iOS to see how it holds up over half a decade after debuting in the West, how it plays on a touchscreen, and compare it on different platforms and iOS devices as usual. With Square Enix premium releases on mobile, it feels like the company throws darts at a board to decide which basic features to skip for each release. The Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters still lacking controller support on mobile is the most recent example of this. Dragon Quest Builders on iOS has basically no controller support as mentioned above, but the real stinger is no iCloud save support. For a deep game like this where you will invest dozens of hours at minimum, having no way to backup your progress, let alone sync it to another iOS device, is awful.

Barring those issues, Square Enix has brought some useful features to Dragon Quest Builders on iOS. You can save anywhere versus being limited in the console version. The lack of save anywhere on Switch made it hard to properly play it on the go in short bursts. In addition to that, the mobile version includes an undo button with a decent history of your actions that you can undo. It also has support for tapping the screen to destroy and place blocks. These are amazing additions that make playing the original console versions a chore. I’ve revisited those to compare with the iPhone and iPad release I have, and it really sticks out.

Barring the new features, Square Enix also has some paid DLC available for Dragon Quest Builders on iOS and Android. These are mainly for the creative mode and not for the main story chapters. Once you unlock Terra Incognita in the game after a bit of playing, you can use this creative mode to build more on over time with new recipe unlocks as you finish more of the main story. The DLC on mobile includes new content only for Terra Incognita mode including an all-in-one bundle that makes a lot more sense to buy than individual items going by the pricing.

So with basically no controller support and no cloud save backup, is Dragon Quest Builders still worth it on iOS? The answer is yes, if you’re playing it on a newer iPhone. I tested it on iPhone SE (the original), iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 12, and iPhone 11. On the iPhone 11 and 12, it runs really well on high, but it has heating issues. On medium graphics, it is more or less fine, while the iPhone 7 Plus and SE struggled to maintain close to 60fps (something the Switch version rarely did properly) unless I used low with the SE struggling there as well.

In its current state, Dragon Quest Builders feels unoptimized with its power consumption causing devices to get warm rather quickly. This causes the screen to dim and performance to tank. This wouldn’t be as much of an issue if the lower graphics options actually had the interface and text look crisp at least. On setting the graphics to low, even the text is blurry. Hopefully an update (yes I can hear you all laughing given this is a Square Enix game on mobile) can address this bit because Dragon Quest Builders is no doubt going to be super successful on mobile in Japan at least.

If you are considering Dragon Quest Builders for playing on iPad, you might want to wait. In its current state, the game seems to have a lot of performance issues even on my iPad Pro (2020). For reference, my iPhone 11 with graphics at high runs the game better than the iPad Pro (2020) at medium. The iPad Air 2 felt like playing it on Switch at the high setting. The other issue is the controls have no customization with placement that I could find making it not feel as nice or intuitive depending on how you hold your iPad and its model. Playing at low wouldn’t be a problem if it didn’t make the text and interface also low resolution as mentioned above.

Now the question is, if you don’t care about the new features and only want to know which version of Dragon Quest Builders looks and runs best, the answer is a modern iPhone version. I don’t have access to the M1 iPad to compare, but right now the iPhone version runs as good as the PS4 version on PS5. One thing to note is that the PS4 version has a few performance issues relating to frame pacing on PS4 and PS4 Pro only in the localized release for North America and Europe which never got fixed. These issues were not present in the Japanese version. On Switch, the game runs at an unlocked frame rate at all times and never feels smooth thanks to its frame pacing issues that make it feel inconsistent. On PS Vita, the game targets a lower frame and is not really worth your time compared to other versions.

Barring cloud save support which is essential, I’d love to see proper controller support added since this game was literally only available on consoles until the mobile version. Square Enix also needs to push out an update soon to address the heating / power consumption issues and iPad version performance. This has the potential to be one of the best premium games on iOS, but some of these issues need to be addressed as soon as possible.

In its current state, Dragon Quest Builders is a fantastic game, but one I can only recommend with some big caveats and if you will stick to playing it on a modern iPhone. If you care about cloud saves, it isn’t here. Controller support is basically absent as well. If you’re considering it on a newer iPhone, it is amazing. On iPad, for some reason it runs a lot worse than I expected even on my iPad Pro (2020) and feels almost as bad as the Switch version does on an older iPad Pro with inconsistent performance. Square Enix has done a fantastic job with the touch controls and the new quality of life features making this the best version of the game on paper, but the power consumption issues need addressing.

While Dragon Quest Builders will not replace Dragon Quest Builders 2 for me, the iOS version of the original is now the best way to experience it even with the issues mentioned if you play on a newer iPhone. Considering Dragon Quest Builders is still priced at $59.99 on PS4 and $49.99 on Nintendo Switch after all these years, the asking price on mobile doesn’t seem as bad as it is, but I will never fault anyone for being hesitant to support Square Enix’s pricing on mobile given how bad the post-launch support can get with future iOS and iPadOS releases. This has the potential to be a 5/5 game on mobile, but Square Enix being Square Enix has dragged it down holding it back from being as good as it can be on iOS and Android. Hopefully Dragon Quest Builders 2 does eventually come to mobile and have a much better initial release.

So what happened to what was arguably SNK’s most popular series during those lost years? Development on The King of Fighters 2001 and The King of Fighters 2002 was handled by a Korean company named Eolith and a group of former SNK employees who had formed a company called BrezzaSoft. With KOF 2001, they closed off the storyline that SNK had been building in the previous installments. By the time KOF 2002 ($3.99) came around, SNK was back in the hands of its original owner and BrezzaSoft had been folded back in. This would be Eolith’s last work on the series, and in some sense that’s a shame because The King of Fighters 2002 is really a fine entry in the series. Some consider it the best, even.

The King of Fighters 2002 is another Dream Match entry, where canon is set aside and characters past and present can come together regardless of where they’re at in the story. While this one doesn’t include every single fighter from the past, with characters like King notable by their absence, you get a whopping thirty-nine playable fighters along with returning boss Omega Rugal. It reverts back to the three-on-three set-up that was used in the earlier games in the series, discarding the Striker system from King of Fighters 99. In a lot of ways, it felt like a throwback to better times for SNK.

It’s an excellent fighting game, with lots of characters to learn, a strong presentation, and good balance. The only real downer with this version is that it’s naturally based on the NEOGEO original. Through various ports and an outstanding remake, more features and characters were added to this game over the course of the decade. The NEOGEO version is the most bare-bones take on the game, and while it’s great on its own, anyone who has played a later version will notice many things are missing. Well, these are the NEOGEO Arcade Archives, I suppose. Can’t fault them for accuracy.

Indeed, as ever we can’t fault Hamster for much here. You get a full array of options for video display, controls, difficulty, and more. There are save states you can use at your leisure, which helps mitigate some of the intense difficulty of the story mode. You can play with an external controller, and even hook up two in order to play with a friend. The standard arcade mode is here in both regional forms, and you can also play a ranked Score Attack and Caravan Mode to try to climb up the online leaderboards. The emulation is as sound as it has been in previous Arcade Archives releases, so there’s nothing to fear on that front.

If you have an external controller, this is a fantastic way to play a really great fighting game. I wish it had some kind of online multiplayer support, but I don’t think the console versions of Arcade Archives have that either. The question, as always, is in how well it adapts to touch controls. If you’ve played any fighting game ports on mobile before, you probably know the story. The touch controls are okay, and if you practice enough you may be able to make a decent go of things, but there’s just no substitute for a physical controller or joystick when it comes to fighters with complex commands like this one. Of course, without external controllers you are also limited to playing against the CPU.

So we end up with a very similar conclusion to when I reviewed Samurai Shodown IV. This is a really strong game, but if you don’t have an external controller or two you’re really not going to get to enjoy the game at its best. While the touch controls aren’t a complete disaster like they were in Puzzled, they’re not as accurate as you’ll need to pull off all of the wild moves packed into this game. On top of that, the lack of online play means you’ll be confined to playing in single-player mode. Hamster has done its usual fine work here, but there’s only so much that can be worked around. If you’re just looking to crack some skulls when you have a spare minute or two, however, this will do the job.

Until the newer ports were announced a little while ago for Japan, I had no idea what Monster Rancher was or how it played. I was hoping the games would be localized, but it didn’t look likely. When Koei Tecmo America and Europe announced an international release for Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX , I was already surprised to see it happen. The fact that the collection was also released on iOS in the West was shocking, but I’m glad it has happened. Over the last week, I’ve been playing both Monster Rancher ($10.99) and Monster Rancher 2 ($15.99) on iOS, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.

If you’ve never heard of Monster Rancher (Monster Farm in Japan), it is a cross media franchise of simulation RPGs from Koei Tecmo that debuted on the original PlayStation and has since seen multiple games across consoles, PC, and mobile platforms. A lot of people mistakenly compare this series to Pokemon or even Shin Megami Tensei. While those two franchises bring monster collecting to RPGs, Monster Rancher are more simulation and monster breeding games that happen to have some RPG elements.

With so many developers and publishers looking to bring back classic games to modern systems, the approach usually varies. Some opt for full scale remakes while others do bare-bones ports that constantly remind you of the source material’s age. Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX from Koei Tecmo is more of the latter with some improvements that make for a more enjoyable experience. Before getting into the games and the port quality, there is some confusion around the release and the naming across platforms.

Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX on Nintendo Switch and Steam is a single purchase that contains both of the first two entries in the series. On iOS, you can buy Monster Rancher and Monster Rancher 2 separately, or get the Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX app bundle that includes both games at a discount. The prices are $15.99 and $22.99 for the individual games with the Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX bundle priced at $29.99 just like on Nintendo Switch and Steam. This review will cover both games as a bundle.

Your aim here is to raise, train, and battle with your monster while making sure it is in a good mood and well. This takes place over different weeks as you take on tournaments to earn money and then get back to raising stats and more. Each monster in Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX has its own lifespan and you keep generating more through the game’s nifty replacement for the CD system. This standout feature in Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX has you inputting various song titles or artist names to use a song to generate a monster. The original games let you actually use a CD to generate a monster with some giving you better and unique monsters. This new database search method is a nice compromise.

I spent quite a bit of time trying out different songs to see how things played out. It was funny being able to generate a monster with Deafheaven’s Great Mass of Color or Tenacious D’s Pick of Destiny. Some songs generate special monsters that have certain requirements before you can use them.

A majority of the gameplay in Monster Rancher is menu-driven and that translates over very well to a touchscreen. The interface scales well on both iPhone and iPad. If you aren’t a fan of touch controls, Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX includes controller support. I had no trouble playing with my PS5 DualSense controller on iPad. I found it much better with touch controls on the iPhone though. I had no trouble with touch or controller during any point of the games.

In terms of new features included over the original releases, both games in Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX feature a fast forward option, higher resolution gameplay, a new camera option to capture screenshots and share them easily, an auto save option, the new database lookup for generating monsters, and more. Monster Rancher 2 also has a remastered soundtrack option. You can disable the sound completely if you’d just like to listen to your own music and play it on the go.

The gameplay itself is still letterboxed with artwork and borders on either side. This applies to all platforms. I was worried the game might end up looking blurry on modern iOS devices given the source material. I’ve liked the aesthetic since I looked up footage when the original ports were announced, and the latest release scales well across newer iPhones and iPads.

Barring the gameplay itself not being for everyone, Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX has a few issues. The localization isn’t amazing. Some of the text feels like a direct translation and no editing. In its current state, there is no way I could find to get your progress from one device to another. Hopefully iCloud save support is added in a future update.

Having now played Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX on PC, iOS, and Nintendo Switch, I figured I’d help potential players find the version that would work best for them. On Nintendo Switch, you have both games in a single purchase with button controls and no touchscreen support. On PC, both games are once again a single purchase with a launcher to select which game you want to play. The PC version also supports mouse controls. On iOS, you get to buy both games individually or in a bundle and have support for both touch and controllers. If you’re wondering if it is worth going for the iOS version over Switch, get Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX where you’d like to play it. This release on Switch and PC was clearly based on the mobile version.

If you’ve not played Monster Rancher before and are wondering if these new ports are worth your time and money, the answer is yes with a few caveats. While I’m pleased with the controls, visuals for the most part, and new features, these two games are quite dated. The asking price might turn some people off given the visuals and screenshots, but I’d definitely look into getting one or both of the games in Monster Rancher 1 & 2 DX when discounted as a curiosity. For longtime fans, Koei Tecmo has done a good job of retaining the original aesthetic while implementing a nice compromise for the CD-generation system for monsters here. Hopefully iCloud save support is added in because that’s all I miss in this release right now.

I think it’s a good choice, if only to deliver on the mission statement of Arcade Archives as we know it on other platforms. Hamster’s line of retro rereleases isn’t just about bringing out the most popular games, or the most critically-acclaimed ones. It aims at a greater sort of preservation, a more complete one. The greats, the not-so-greats, and everything in between. Some of Hamster’s choices can boggle the mind, but it not only paints a more thorough historical picture, it also allows players to find fun games they may have never stumbled upon before.

Now, Alpha Mission II isn’t that obscure. Indeed, in the early days of the NEOGEO it was a bit of a darling. A flashy vertical shoot-em-up with tons of power-ups and a few really wild stages. Your ship can collect armor pieces and go into one of several cool powered-up modes. It got good reviews, earned lots of quarters, and entertained people for a while until other titles bumped it off the rotation. History has been less kind to it, with more modern releases earning some sharp words and garnering little attention. It doesn’t really fit the character that the platform ultimately settled into. But in its time and place, it was fine.

What helps here is that it is a shoot-em-up, and shoot-em-ups take to mobile quite well. While you can make use of an external controller if you have one, the virtual controls work quite well here. You can even turn on auto-fire. You can only partake in the multiplayer co-op gameplay if you have external controllers for each player, but I suspect most people playing shooters on their mobile devices aren’t too concerned about that.

You get the same assortment of options, extras, and features as in the other Arcade Archives mobile releases. Difficulty options, control mapping and layouts, graphical and audio settings, save states, and more. One feature I particularly like for this game is the ability to rotate the screen and play in portrait mode. You can do it with the other releases, but it just feels better here. Now, this is a 4:3 game so don’t expect it to fill the screen if you play it like this, but it’s still cool.

The same modes of play are on offer here as well. You can play either the Japanese or Overseas version of the game, see how high of a score you can get on a single credit, or play a Caravan mode where you have five minutes to earn as many points as you can. Caravan modes and shooters go very well together, and it’s fun to see how high up the leaderboards you can climb. Yes, Alpha Mission II is a case where everything in the Arcade Archives package comes together quite nicely.

As for the game itself? Well, it’s alright. The power-up system is a bit confusing (there are power-downs, and those are fun), the bullet patterns are a little on the rude side, your default weapons lack much punch, some stages are an absolute drag, and it can be irritating trying to get into your armored state as you need to be very careful about what you pick up and what you don’t. But once you get used to how it all works, you can have a good time with it. Learning when to use your armored form and when to save it is a nice bit of strategy. The second level, which sees you taking apart a massive ship piece-by-piece, is quite memorable. It certainly tries some interesting things, including a between-level shop system.

Alpha Mission II is hardly a must-have or a must-play, but a decent enough spin for the few bucks it’s selling for. If you enjoy classic shoot-em-ups, you’ll get a few thrills out of this. More importantly, it fits the mobile platform a lot more comfortably than its peers in the Arcade Archives line-up so far. The game plays quite well with the virtual controls, so even if you don’t have access to an external controller you can still have a really good time. If you want to see what these Arcade Archives releases are all about in the best possible light, this is the one to get.

UPDATE: As pointed out in our forums, these ACA NEOGEO released DO in fact support physical controllers, it’s just not very obvious. With a controller connected to your device, click the icon on the title screen that looks kind of like a USB cable with Wi-Fi signals coming out of it to enable the controller support.

The list of differences with the Pixel Remaster when compared to the previous mobile version is almost identical to that of the first game. We’ve got completely new visuals that you may or may not prefer. There’s a new version of the soundtrack that sounds outstanding. Gameplay rules hew a bit closer to the Famicom version in some ways than they do the previous remakes, though not significantly so. All of the content added in the various remakes has been left out of this game, almost as if this were the first remake of the original game. That latter point is a major blow to this game, in my opinion. It leaves me questioning which of the two versions I would actually recommend to someone if the choice was there, and I don’t think that’s really where Square Enix wants any of these remakes to be.

Unlike the added content in most of the other games, Final Fantasy II‘s extras actually built on the game’s story in a meaningful way. It put you in control of a party of characters who had stepped out of the main story, challenging you to make your way through some tough areas with scarce resources. It served as a wonderful bit of closure for those characters, resonated well with the original story’s themes, and was a lovely ending for the narrative as a whole. Sure, the original game didn’t have any of this and it stood on its own feet just fine, but this is a rare case where I think after-the-fact added content actually made for a far better game.

Assuming you can set that aside more easily than I can, you’ll find this to be a very agreeable version of a somewhat disagreeable game. It certainly looks, sounds, and plays sharper than the now-antiquated 11-year-old original app. This and the first game needed this refresh more than the others just on the basis of their age, and it’s good to see it looking so spiffy on modern devices. The content that is present in this version is certainly looking its finest, though I’m sure tastes on the chosen art style will vary. Would I buy this if I already had the original app and it was still working properly? Not unless I was a big Final Fantasy II fan or a completionist. But if you’re going to play the original Final Fantasy II adventure for the first time, this is an excellent way to do it.

But do you want to play the original Final Fantasy II adventure? It’s a more difficult question than it is for most Final Fantasy games. While the series tends to play things fast and loose with each new installment, it has generally followed the conventions of the JRPG genre in most ways. Final Fantasy II wasn’t a dramatic shift at the time, but the rules weren’t so well-defined then. Things evolved in a very different way after that, and it makes Final Fantasy II feel a bit out-of-step in hindsight. But if you’ve partaken of any of the recent rereleases of the SaGa games, you’ll see a lot of familiar elements here.

Character growth comes not from gathering up experience points and gaining levels, but from using your abilities, casting spells, and taking damage. The more you use things, the stronger they will get. In some ways, this goes as you would hope. Weapons get stronger, spells get more powerful. In other ways, it’s unreliable. Your HP and MP don’t naturally scale up the way they need to at times, which may require you to give them a nudge by doing unnatural things like casting spells repeatedly or even knocking your own party about. I don’t recommend overdoing this, but it’s certainly something people can and do take advantage of even if it’s not very fun.

Indeed, from a mechanical standpoint Final Fantasy II can be terribly unbalanced. It begs to be exploited, and if you play it straight you’re going to find the game quite difficult in places. Especially since a few of the kludges added in the later remakes have been removed in this Pixel Remaster. This is a bit closer to the original game, for better or worse. Other design elements that weren’t addressed in previous remakes remain intact here. Silly monster closets, invisible lines on the overworld map that divide monsters that you can kill and monsters that will tear you to shreds, and a final boss that can be almost impossible to take down if you don’t have precisely the right set-up; these are all hallmarks of a game that doesn’t always expect players to beat it.

Yet as much as Final Fantasy II feels alien to its series mechanically, its narrative is as familiar as it gets. A ragtag group of kids orphaned by an evil empire joins up with a rebellion to take down the evil man at the top and save the world in the process. They meet up with a variety of friends who will come into and exit from their story as the plot demands, travel to a variety of lands, and face seemingly unsurmountable odds. While they can be a bit thin in terms of personality, the characters in this game are indeed characters instead of the blank ciphers of the original game. If you’re looking to see where Final Fantasy got its start as a story-driven franchise, this is it.

My main complaints about this new version largely mirror those I had for the first game’s Pixel Remaster. The cut content is unfortunate, the font’s relatively small size and cramped nature makes it a bit of a chore to read on a phone display, and there is no controller support. The touch controls work well enough, and are easier to use than those of the original app, but options never hurt anyone. I expect to have these complaints with all of the Pixel Remaster games, so I do apologize if they start to become monotonous for regular readers. This is still a very good version of the game, but it could have been a bit better with some small UI and quality of life improvements.

Final Fantasy II Pixel Remaster is a lovely remake of a game that people tend to either love or hate. Its strongest element is arguably its story, and that’s why I feel it’s hurt so much by cutting the excellent extra content added in the Game Boy Advance version. With that in mind, I think it’s best to stick with the old version of the game if you already own it and it still works. This new version is more modern in its presentation and UI, and ultimately it will be the one that survives. It’s also the only one you can buy now, so if you want to play Final Fantasy II it’s this or nothing. I enjoy the game, but you will need to be willing to put up with its eccentricities if you seek to do the same.

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What happened last time? Well, it’s complicated. To start with, SaGa Frontier is a SaGa game, with all that implies. It’s a very, very quirky series by nature, often confusing players with esoteric rules and non-standard systems. SaGa Frontier was the seventh game in the series, and as such it was built with the idea that the players would have a basic understanding of the off-beat nature that characterized SaGa. It’s considerably harder to get into than almost all of its predecessors. Western players didn’t have that context, of course. We missed out on the three Romancing SaGa games, and while the Game Boy games had their devotees they were also a bit closer to a familiar JRPG structure.

The biggest problem for poor old SaGa Frontier is that it was the first SquareSoft JRPG released after Final Fantasy 7 in the West. That game was something of a lightning rod for the genre in the West, pulling in people who had never touched a console RPG before. As “first" JRPGs go, Final Fantasy 7 was a great one. An exciting story, dazzling (for the time) 3D visuals, plenty of action-packed mini-games, generally forgiving difficulty, and easily understood mechanics. As “second" JRPGs go, SaGa Frontier was… less than ideal. There are seven different protagonists (eight in Remastered, but we’ll get to that) each with their own story, and no guidance as to which one a player should choose to start with. Some gorgeous art, but decidedly plainer than Final Fantasy 7. Difficulty spikes all over the place, and even some places where you can get stuck if you didn’t level properly beforehand. Bizarre, opaque mechanics from top to bottom.

Almost everyone who had found their love for the genre through Final Fantasy 7 bounced off of SaGa Frontier hard. The game got what would become the usual SaGa treatment from the West; it was seen as an annoying, confusing mess. Written off as not worth the time or money. The black sheep of the SquareSoft PlayStation RPG catalog. To quote one review from the time, a “depressing misfire". Over in Japan? It sold over a million copies, ended up being the 15th best-selling game on the original PlayStation, and was beloved. It was even included in the PlayStation Classic mini-console in Japan. Clearly, perspective affected people’s opinions of this game. So where is SaGa Frontier now?

To begin, let’s address what this remaster brings to the table, because it is relatively substantial. The biggest thing is the inclusion of an eighth main character, complete with his own storyline. Fuse was meant to be in the original game, but had to be cut along with one other character for time and disc space reasons. His scenario was a somewhat important one, as it would see him bob in and out of the other characters’ stories, tying the tales together. His implementation here is quite different from other characters. He basically has his own route for each of the other seven characters, giving you an alternate take on their stories. This helps flesh out the rest of the cast, and I suppose if there were any great purpose a new story in a remaster could accomplish, that is one of the better ones. Aside from Fuse, some smaller bits of content that were originally cut from the stories of a couple of characters has been restored.

Other additions include graphical touch-ups, turbo mode, improved equipment menus, and a few real game-changers like New Game+, a story synopsis that helps you figure out what you should be doing, and the ability to run from battles. New Game+ makes it a lot easier to play through the game with all of the characters, as each subsequent run will make you more powerful for the next. The story synopsis can help give direction to a rather aimless game, and the ability to run from battles can cut down on a lot of the combat. I caution you not to rely too heavily on these last two additions, as they will leave you in poor condition for some of the game’s challenges. All of these improvements are welcome and add up to a significantly better experience. SaGa Frontier Remastered is without question the best way to play this game.

Okay, but how about that game? Should you play it? Is it brilliant or is it bad? TELL ME, MAN OF THE FUTURE! I will answer your questions with a few questions of my own. Have you played a SaGa game before? Did you like it? Are you open to unconventional games? Are you fine with frustrating games? Do you get a kick of learning complicated systems so that you can break the game over your knee? If you’re hitting me with a bunch of “yes" answers, go for it. This is your jam. Eight characters, each one giving you about ten hours of gameplay, adding up to eighty hours of Kawazu Madness. The battle system and way characters develop will be familiar to anyone who has gone a few rounds with a SaGa game before, but beyond that this is a wildly experimental game in a series not known for playing it safe.

I like SaGa Frontier, but I’ve found myself growing increasingly fond of the oddities as I get older. I’ve played so many normal JRPGs. So, so many. When I get a big ol’ Kawazu Banana Cream Pie thrown in my face, it excites me rather than irritates me. It wasn’t always that way, but that’s how it is now. I like that I don’t know what’s going on immediately. I enjoy poking at the mechanics to figure out what works. I still don’t like it when I get painted into a nasty corner, and that does happen in a couple of places in SaGa Frontier, but I see it as a small price to pay for the more pleasant surprises that come with the irritations. You may not see things the way I do. I do not begrudge you for that. I once was you. This game is expensive. Don’t buy it just because I’m jumping around like a hyper-caffeinated squirrel. If you’ve tried a SaGa game before and didn’t like it, head for the hills immediately. There are SaGa games that may change your mind. This is not one of them.

The now-familiar SaGa systems that this game uses are enjoyable to me. Stats level up the more I use them? Sure. Learning new moves in the middle of a battle out of pure chance? Spark me up, friend. As for the presentation, I think the game actually looks gorgeous, and to an extent always did. The music? Hoo boy, don’t even get me started. Kenji Ito brought the fire, as he always does. I think the scenario system is a very cool concept, and while I’m not overly fond of every character (Lute, get in the corner and think about what you’ve done), I’m fond of enough of them that the “free scenario" set-up works. Each character’s story has a short enough run time that the game as a whole feels like a collection of mini-RPGs, and I absolutely love the new character’s angle on things. This game is a chaotic mess, but it’s my kind of chaotic mess. One of the characters is a superhero! What’s up with that? I love it. Start with Emilia, by the way. Thank me later.

Should you buy SaGa Frontier Remastered? I… I don’t know, to be honest. It is an immensely flawed game with so many rough edges you’ll sometimes feel like you’re juggling angry badgers covered in Captain Crunch. But there’s a real appeal to it, a method to its mess, and you can feel the heart that went into all of it, even the parts that don’t work. Especially the parts that don’t work. All I can really say is that if you’ve enjoyed a SaGa game in the past, you’re in the right place to get what this game is laying down. If you want a weird RPG, this could be your new obsession. If you just came off of playing Final Fantasy 7 and want something like it, stop now. Cease your attack. Go buy Final Fantasy 9 or something. SaGa Frontier Remastered, even with all of its improvements, isn’t here for the approval of the masses. It wants to make a couple of very good friends, even if it ticks off the rest of the room in doing so. You might be one of those friends. The odds aren’t in your favor, but when has SaGa ever cared about the safe bet?

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The iOS version seems to be based on that build going by version number. This means iOS is at content parity with consoles including the Nuclear Update. Forager has a lot of gameplay systems working together to create an experience that might either feel perfect (as it does for me) or too convoluted for you. It has exploration, crafting, gathering, simulation, combat, dungeons, idle game mechanics, fishing, and a lot more. You can see the influence from the likes of The Legend of Zelda and even Terraria here.

You initially start on a small island with just a pickaxe. Your aim at the beginning is to gather what you see and slowly start crafting structures as more resources spawn. The opening minutes of Forager are a bit dull but they go a long way in making sure you get used to the routine of ensuring you’ve eaten, understand how to gather, and how to build basic structures. Even upgrading your equipment takes a long time. As you keep doing this, you will be able to buy new land. What’s great about Forager is that the RNG aspect of resources and enemies, along with the ability to buy land as you please and unlock different skill paths, will ensure you don’t have a similar experience in your next run or save file.

The game drastically changes depending on which skills you unlock, but you will reach a point where the game does feel like everything is automated to the point where you mostly just move around as your pets and companions or structures do everything for you. At this point there’s almost too much happening on the screen at once and it’s a visual overload in a good way. This is also where the performance will vary as it does on consoles.

Forager has a very charming aesthetic and this carries over to everything in the game like the interface, design of structures, enemies, and items. It initially may look simple but the developers have nailed the visual style here. Given how much you hear some of the songs in Forager, it is great that the score from Hernan Marandino is so catchy. It never gets old with its upbeat tunes and even the more mellow ones like the museum theme. It also runs fullscreen on iPhone 11 and iPad Pro and looks excellent.

When I first launched Forager on iOS, I was impressed by the amount of features I look for in a port all seemingly being included. Forager has “cloud saving" but it hasn’t reliably worked for me beyond the first sync. Controller support on the other hand is well-implemented. You can even switch the button prompts being displayed between Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One which is useful for people coming from another platform. Sadly, there is no support for rumble right now. Since iOS recently added rumble support, hopefully the developers can work it into this port. I’ve verified that this is still the same even with version 1.02 that released earlier today.

When it comes to touch controls, the implementation here is acceptable. I couldn’t find any form of customization in-game. You use a floating analog on the left to move and can swipe on the right of the screen to dodge or evade. After dodging you can’t move for a bit, while it is nearly instant on other systems. When you’re near a point of interest an A button is displayed on the right to interact. Inventory can be switched by tapping on an item in the bar at the bottom.

When Forager initially launched on consoles, it lacked a lot of accessibility options and visual settings. Thankfully, the iOS version includes all the options to turn off screen shake and the like right from the get go. Sadly, there are no visual options to improve the frame rate or adjust certain visual settings like bloom. You can disable the weather effects though.

My biggest problems with this release barring the touch control issues are to do with the responsiveness, cloud syncing, and interface. Forager has iCloud save syncing but it only reliably works the first time. I couldn’t get it to sync at all after and had to delete and reinstall Forager for it to force sync the save. I tested this on multiple devices on two different iCloud accounts. Performance as a whole is a big downer for me on iPhone 11 and iPad Pro (2020). Forager feels much more responsive on consoles across its UI and the game itself. The final issue is in touch targets for buttons. In some cases, the UI scales well but others it feels too small with no real consideration for touch input sizes.

Overall, Forager on iOS is a bit of a mixed bag. On its own, it is easy to recommend assuming you play with a controller because the touch controls aren’t great and there’s no real customization for them. However, if you already own Forager on another system and want a portable version, I’d recommend waiting for a patch to see if the control issues and UI get addressed. Forager itself is a must play as far as I’m concerned but the iOS port leaves a lot to be desired despite being more feature complete than most console-to-mobile ports. Hopefully these updates don’t take as long as the initial console updates did because this is absolutely a game that is perfect to play on the go and one that will have you keep coming back for a quick play session. Once it gets fixed up a bit, this will likely be one of the games I play the most on my phone.

That might be the case with Loud House: Outta Control, a game developed by Double Stallion in collaboration with Nickelodeon, that’s based on the TV show with the same name. The TV show is about the life of Lincoln Loud and his 10 sisters. I grew up with one sister, and that was a roller coaster. I can’t even imagine how this kid deals with them.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a fan of the show to start playing Loud House: Outta Control. Sure, knowing the story or the characters will help. But, for the most part, you can enjoy Outta Control without knowing anything at all.

This is mostly because Outta Control is a mini-game. There’s no story or campaign mode, and the gameplay is extremely easy. Mind you, this is a game made for children, so don’t come looking for the Dark Souls of Apple Arcade.

There’s a total of 30 levels in Outta Control. Each level is based on a room from the Loud House. In each level, you’ll guide the characters from the show to their respective items. There’s a timer, so you need to match as many characters as you possibly can while avoiding random fights or colliding with other Loud House characters. The more characters you match, the more points you’ll receive. When you finish a level, you’ll receive medals, based on the number of points you got.

Learning how to play Outta Control is easy, although I’d recommend skipping Bluetooth controllers on this one. The screen works way better. That said, too many characters and some RNG make Loud House a difficult game to complete.

While younger audiences and fans from the show might enjoy the game, outsiders and older gamers might get bored playing Outta Control. Its gameplay can get repetitive and doing the same thing over and over again turns it into a chore. That’s something even hardcore fans will not appreciate.

Besides the different rooms you’ll play in, you can also visit the attic. This is where you’ll have the collectibles and awards you win at each level. Each collectible is based on things from the show, like Lincoln comics.

Aesthetically, Loud House is great. Every character and environment is identical to what you can see on the show, and sometimes you’ll even hear the character’s original voices throughout the game. Its bright colors and smooth animations are top-notch, and even have potential to work as an interactive episode in the future.

Overall, Loud House: Outta Control is a good mini-game, but it’s a tougher fit as an Apple Arcade game. As a mini-game from the App Store, this is a good game to play and to kill time with. It looks and feels great when playing, and provides a challenging yet fun experience.

As an Apple Arcade game though, Outta Control lacks an engaging story, complex and fun gameplay, and other characteristics that other Apple Arcade games have already given us. In a world with awesome and creative games like Jenny LeClue or Sayonara Wild Hearts, Outta Control seems outta place.

As a fan of platformers, puzzlers, and games featuring minimalist art in general, my interest was immediately piqued. An interesting story? Great art? Solid level design? Altogether, it’s a recipe for absolute success and I’m all for it. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was quickly dampened after only a little play, as I quickly found that many things were not as I expected.

Before we talk about what could have been better, though, let’s go over what Incredible Mandy does well: Level design. Right off the bat, levels are built to impress with sweeping vistas of far-off places, puzzles yet to be solved, and puzzles you’ve already solved. The puzzles themselves require engaging with the environment, shifting levers and objects this way and that to clamber over them, across ledges, and over chasms. It’s something that has been done before, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable here.

As a rule, puzzle games are pretty relaxing and this is no exception. That said, it can certainly be a little frustrating at times with a few time sensitive segments. Boss fights are a big part of this, although even they don’t really punish players beyond a little lost health for being too slow or taking a little too long to figure ’em out, and even then they’re pretty generous. On the whole, between the piano in the background, the near constant search for both health and story collectibles, and numerous opportunities to sit back and think about the puzzles, the vast majority of Incredible Mandy is a very laidback game.

Speaking of story, the way it is delivered is rather interesting. At the end of each dream, players are given a short (maybe five or six panels, at most) comic, illuminating a day, an event, or perhaps just a feeling or brief exchange between the player character (the brother) and his sister. Additional comics can be found in chests scattered throughout the levels, adding little details that would otherwise be missed. Personally, I like it, although it does irk me that there isn’t really a way to track what you’ve collected in any given area, and whether or not there’s more you haven’t found. It makes sense to keep the hidden objectives hidden, but that doesn’t make searching every last corner for something that may or may not be there any less tedious.

While the basic gameplay is pretty good, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that could have been done better. Notably, the controls feel a bit sluggish (especially with a controller), combat feels almost like an afterthought, and the visuals are… bare and poorly optimized, to say the least. While none of these things break the experience on their own, they do make it less enjoyable. Put together, it sometimes becomes downright cumbersome to get through parts of the game.

The touch controls work about as well as can be expected of a virtual joystick & buttons, but the camera sensitivity is a little high, especially when aiming the bow. Why didn’t I just change it, you ask? Great question! While there is a sensitivity slider in the settings, it seems to be universal, determining both the aiming sensitivity and the camera sensitivity. While annoying, it’s bearable with touch controls with the help of the very, very aggressive aim assist’s strong preference for placed swords (this is a good thing). If you use a controller, though, it’s a little more problematic. See, the camera problems apply to controllers as well, but there’s also no controller-specific sensitivity… meaning if you need to use a high sensitivity with your controller and a low sensitivity with touch controls, you’ll have to change them manually every time swap inputs.

Combat, on the other hand, is a little more questionable. The only time, as far as I can tell, it ever makes an appearance is during the boss fights at the end of each Dream. Moreover, it isn’t especially satisfying combat, instead seeming to be a blend of puzzle mechanics and hack & slash gameplay focused on boss stages. While it sounds interesting, it could be just as interesting (or perhaps even more so) without combat by turning each boss encounter into an actual puzzle that requires manipulating boulders, lava, or other environmental effects to beat. As it stands, though, calling Incredible Mandy an action adventure game is akin to calling Tomb Raider or an Uncharted game a puzzle game: Not entirely wrong, but definitely misleading.

Visually, Incredible Mandy is pretty. I would even go so far as to say that, at times, it is very pretty. That said, it does have one giant, glaring weakness: Detail. There is both too little and too much detail. Throughout most of the game, the environments are bare, lacking the little embellishments that would really stand out and make the game feel complete, the little additions that add character to even the most basic features. Most notably, the player character is missing a face. While I suspect this is was an intentional decision, it stands out pretty starkly in comparison to his well detailed clothes. On the other side of the scale, the game slows to a crawl in some fights with over the top particle effects, or during a few especially particle heavy puzzles. It’s very jarring in an otherwise buttery smooth game, and not something I expect to find on my iPad Pro.

Ultimately, Incredible Mandy is a long ways from being the game I thought it would be. Despite that, and despite the controls, the combat, the overly-taxing particle effects and bare environments, it is a fun game. While the overall experience was not what it could have been, I still enjoyed running around the varied landscapes, solving puzzles, and admiring many an expansive view. While I have a hard time recommending it, if you happen to enjoy adventures, puzzles, and have also exhausted your backlog, it’s worth a shot.

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As with most ports of computer or console games, finding the groove of iOS controls and how it differs from a keyboard or controller can be difficult. For some genres, like puzzles and arcade-style games, the transition can be seamless. However, for others, it may be a bit more difficult. FPS games and sidescrollers still struggle to translate directly over to touchscreen devices solely because reaction times are a key element of play. Some games, like Super Mario Run, Lara Croft GO, and Fire Emblem Heroes put a slight twist on the mechanics of gameplay in order to make the game more accessible on a touchscreen. With a point-and-click style game, it would be assumed that when moving over to iOS, there should be no problem. Sadly, there are a few.

From the start of the game, the text along the bottom of the screen still reads “PRESS ENTER” despite being on a fully touchscreen device. This, in itself, is excusable. A graphical mistake has no barring on how fun or enjoyable – or even playable – a game may be. When you progress into the game itself, the simplest of things begin to pull back the curtain and feel as if moving to iOS was approached with haste and disregard. Tapping an arrow to interact with a different item in the environment you’re in works just as expected. But when given the option between choosing one or two item or options, you’re guided to hold a side of the screen until your decision is made final. In action, it doesn’t fair as well as it would on a console or computer. It feels clunky and unintuitive. It’s as if the remnants of 3D Touch are yearning to creep through this app and this app alone; forgoing any design language found elsewhere on iOS. These mistakes or oversights are not completely overridden when factoring in the game itself.

Little Misfortune’s titular character, Misfortune Ramirez Hernandez, speaks in a very bubbly, charming tone that would be expected of any young child. The things she discusses and explains, however, are not. Within the first few minutes of the game, you’re introduced to themes that even adults struggle to deal with. There’s mention of her father being abusive towards her and her mother, the idea of what “feelings” are and how she may have these feelings for a *fox*, accidental murder of a child’s parents by that same child, and even the depths of suicide. All of these themes are longstanding and important to the overall story, but it lacks in delivery. Almost every portion of it feels ham-fisted and as if it is thrown in solely for its shock value. Worst of all, some of these themes and ideas are introduced once and quickly vacated.

The game does seem to understand itself, however. There is a level of ironic self-awareness in the ridiculousness of the story and how it’s told. Misfortune is given glitter early on in the game that can be thrown around at any given time despite the undertones and severity of the situation. It adds a level of comedic relief to otherwise tense and hard-to-grasp situations. Although, it does leave a bit to be desired. It feels as if things are presented with shock value, solely to be juxtaposed by the glitter and soft, child voice that Misfortune has paired with her own joyous personality.

It’s not all bad, though. Where the game shines, it really shines. The voice acting of every single character is magnificent. It allows you to fell closer to the characters while breathing life into them despite how things around them are transpiring. As the story advances, you start to care more for the characters solely because of how the voice acting is able to prop those characters up and deliver a range of emotions that run against how someone would normally act during the same event in reality.

Even when logic lets you know if a character will end up being good or bad, there’s still a connection to them and their underlying story. Sadly, this ironically hurts the game in certain aspects. For example, the lack of story building or characterization for some of the background players leaves a lot to be desired. There are important people throughout the story, but bringing up how one child, a friend of Misfortune’s, is experiencing a traumatic event and then laying it by the wayside can negatively hurt the game overall. It begins to feel empty and barren when there are big things happening around, but very few of which are expounded upon.

The storytelling, save for the writing of it, exists on a plane above many other games. Traversing from one scene to the next feels effortless and fluid. The story develops with each new direction, leaving more and more to be desired and expected. The story itself doesn’t throw loops or become hard to follow and progress through, but rather places you in the center of the action with decisions to make. It’s enticing and exciting to actually feel involved in a story that is entirely foreign that has been painted in front of us.

The characters within the story have a level of depth that doesn’t necessarily expand beyond what we see on the surface. What’s presented is essentially what’s given. There are small moments where a character may act – well, out of character – but it’s never the starting point of something entirely different from how the character would act otherwise. However, each and every character blends and melds well together in this pot of ludicrously strung together plot points.

On top of all of that, the artwork and sounds from this game are woven together so gracefully. There is a bit of meta awareness and irony in how the art is cheery and peaceful, paired with sounds brightening or dampening an environment, and how both of those together stand opposite of what seems to be less meticulously thought out writing. The art of each scene feels like it was placed together with every bit and part having a purpose. The sounds capture exactly how the game would expect you to feel. Both of them together shoot and land higher than any other aspect of the game itself.

Little Misfortune is a fine game. It’s fun to play, it’s enticing, and it tells an interesting story that’s foreign to many of us. It utilizes metaphors for abuse and overcoming it, sometimes tackling it right on the nose, while still remaining grounded in what it tries to accomplish. It just doesn’t necessarily feel all that genuine in how it conveys those themes. At times, it feels downright cheesy and lost in itself. But everything else around the game shows just how much care was put in developing the game and building the world inside it. As a port, it doesn’t fail, but it barely survives. Its clunky controls and lack of understanding the overall user experience in mobile gaming highlight some of the critical oversights that lay on its surface.

With all that said, Little Misfortune is still a game worth playing if you’re a fan of classic point-and-click adventure titles or if you like traveling down darker paths with stories that unfold the entire way through. At its worst, Little Misfortune is a game that makes missteps that become apparent while playing it from a critical standpoint. At its absolute best, it’s a game that encapsulates thoughts and emotions that many wouldn’t consider while giving you a story that grows with each turn, and voice acting that sets it above many others.

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It was developing its own engine that it hoped to use in all of its future projects. It had announced multiple Final Fantasy projects, and none of them were coming together properly. Dragon Quest went handheld, and Microsoft was throwing money around for any substantial Japanese support. Square Enix had bet big on the PlayStation 3, and that was proving to be a bit worrisome. A lot of odd games came out at this time, and looking at it all from the outside you really have to wonder what was going on.

The Last Remnant was developed using Unreal Engine 3 by a team of people who had previously worked on the SaGa games. It was Square Enix’s first game using the engine, and one of the first big Japanese titles to do so. None of the documentation was available in Japanese, which caused a lot of issues. Although originally announced for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the game ultimately only hit the former. The latter version was quietly cancelled. The game didn’t sell particularly well, and there was good reason to think it would fall down the same memory hole as, say, Infinite Undiscovery.

Interestingly, the fact that the game was built on the Unreal Engine is likely why it avoided that fate. A PC version was created, and a rebuilt version using Unreal Engine 4 was launched across a variety of platforms. It’s this version that has now made its way to mobile in what is Square Enix’s biggest and most ambitious mobile port yet. Seriously, I hope you have a lot of spare room on your device. This game is massive. So hey, The Last Remnant Remastered ($19.99) must really be something, right? It got a mobile release before a lot of Final Fantasy games that would surely run on today’s devices, after all.

Well, that’s the tricky thing. The Last Remnant has a lot of good qualities. It’s a really nice-looking game. It’s certainly a full-fat RPG, with its main story taking a legitimate 60+ hours to clear and its side content adding a fair bit on top of that. It has some really interesting gameplay systems, and the story… well, the story has its moments, I suppose. If you’ve been thirsty for a big, high-budget single-player RPG to play on your mobile device, this will certainly quench that thirst.

That said, while this game wasn’t created under the direct guidance of eclectic creator Akitoshi Kawazu, it is very much his people. And that can, and does, mean certain things for its design. It has a very unusual battle system that isn’t overly well-explained and can be hard to understand if you don’t pay careful attention. There are a lot of seemingly random systems at play. Difficulty balance is all over the place. I’d say the average person is as likely to hate the game as they are to love it. It is opaque, complex, and not terribly well-paced. On top of that, you’ll have to contend with some occasionally awkward touch controls in this mobile version.

If you’re patient with it, there are rewards to reap. While it can take a while to wrap your head around its combat system, it’s quite a bit of fun once you do. You control groups rather than individuals, which gives battles a really nice sense of scale. You have to carefully consider the position of each group and the enemies, as you’ll take quite a bit of damage if you get yourself boxed in. You can do the same to the enemies, of course. Get them in a position where they can’t move without exposing their flank then send another group around to hit them from another angle, and you’ll deal heavy damage. Be mindful of this and most battles will go smoothly. Ignore it and even the simplest skirmishes can drag out.

There are a lot of other factors to take into account, many of which will be quite familiar to fans of the SaGa games. Formations are important, and which you’ll want to use will depend on which characters you’ve got grouped together. Stat gains happen somewhat randomly depending on the actions you take, but enemy strength will increase pretty consistently as your Battle Rank goes up. You can paint yourself into soft corners if you’re not careful because of this aspect. Each battle also has a meter that represents momentum, so the better you’re doing the more likely you’ll land hits and such. It’s a lot. And as mentioned, the game really does a terrible job of explaining any of this.

You also don’t have as much fine control as you may like. You give broad orders to each group based on the current situation, and each member will act as they see fit in accordance with that order. You really only have full say over protagonist Rush Sykes, and that extends to things like equipment and upgrades as well. Characters will ask you for new gear or the odd material they need to upgrade their own gear, and that’s about as much input as you get. It fits from a narrative point of view, to be sure, but some players may find all of this obfuscation quite frustrating.

Unfortunately, if you don’t get into the battle system, I’m not sure any other aspect of The Last Remnant is going to sell you on the game. The story starts with some promise but ultimately loses track of its own tail partway through. The exploration is relatively straightforward, and sidequests aren’t all that thrilling to complete. Like with most of the SaGa games, one gets the sense that the gameplay systems were designed first and the rest of the game was built around them. Those systems are very well designed, but they’re also so unconventional and complicated that you really have to put in a certain amount of effort to start having fun with them. And if you’re not willing to do that, I can’t say I blame you.

With all that in mind, it’s a bit hard to give The Last Remnant a terribly strong recommendation. I like the game well enough, but the pieces don’t fit together as well as some of the other games that Akitoshi Kawazu had a hand in. Even at its best, it doesn’t come anywhere near the sheer joy of SaGa Scarlet Grace‘s masterful gameplay. That’s a shame, because this game sure does look and sound great. If you’re willing to invest time and energy into a rather cumbersome game to find the gold within, you may enjoy The Last Remnant. But while it may not have the word ‘SaGa‘ in its name, know that it represents that brand’s typical ups and downs quite thoroughly in its essence. Proceed with caution.

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And now, they’re finally back with a new Apple Arcade game. This time we’re looking at the horrors of being an adult living a meaningless, monotonous life in a world that doesn’t care about you, leaving a void inside and craving any form of human attention. Did I go too far? I think I went too far.

The game is called The Mosaic. You play as an ordinary man, living an ordinary life in which nothing seems to happen. You have no partner, no friends, no one. You wake up to go to work to then go back to bed. You are isolated from a cold, dark world while still being part of it.

All this changes one day, as different things start to occur. Butterflies, musicians, and talking fish appear out of nowhere to help you understand that what you’re doing is not living.

Mosaic is not a scary game, but its environment is scary. Everything seems cold and dark. Sometimes it gets too dark, so it’s hard to see what’s going on or where you are. Still, everything in the game, from the music to the atmosphere gives you a creepy feeling that something scary might happen. But nothing bad really happens. In fact, nothing really happens.

The game takes place in the span of a few days. And every day is basically the same. You wake up, check your phone, get ready for work, and start your commute. Once you’re done, you start your actual job, which is extracting resources to deliver a milestone.

Sure, as you make progress, you get to see more of the protagonist’s life and development. Still, every day is the same repetitive tasks. Now, you might think this makes the game boring, and you’d be partially right.

However, more than a game, Mosaic is an experience that showcases the real problem that is modern isolation. Throughout the game, you’re mostly invisible. In your job, you’re nothing but a number on a server. In your life, people literally avoid you. They don’t make eye contact, and they literally walk away from you.

Krillbite does a great job of making you feel the fear of loneliness while being surrounded by thousands of people. People that actually feel the same way you do, but they’re too invested trying to get joy out of their smartphones that they forget how to interact with someone in real life. Some of you might have felt this. I know I have. And looking at it from this perspective makes you think about your own life as well.

That being said, most people won’t think about Mosaic as hard as I’m doing it right now, and if you’re just looking for a game to play, you might find this game quite slow and even frustrating.

Which brings us to the worst part of Mosaic: Its controls. When you’re using your screen, you don’t have much control over the protagonist. Or at least, as much control as you should. Honestly, throughout the game, I never really knew exactly how you control the character. Sometimes he moved by sliding my finger, sometimes it worked just by tapping.

One thing is certain, it was never easy. I got stuck on walls even if I wasn’t touching them. The perspective didn’t help either. Moving towards or away from the screen was the hardest thing in the game. If you combine this with you not knowing where to go or what to do and you’ll get frustrated.

I can see people divided by this game. On one hand, you have an experience that some of us might even need to experience to put out lives in perspective. On the other hand, people that only want to play a game will not enjoy it as much.

Overall, Mosaic is a game you should try for yourself. Its story, although a bit short and predictable, is appealing, relatable and rewarding in the end. However, the experience of the game might not be enough to tolerate the bad controls and monotonous gameplay.

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NOTE: The Mosaic is available on mobile exclusively as part of Apple Arcade, a premium gaming subscription service from Apple. Without being a subscriber to Apple Arcade you cannot download and play this game. Apple Arcade is $4.99 per month and does come with a free one month trial, you can learn more about it on Apple’s official website or by visiting our dedicated Apple Arcade forum.

Normally I reserve my early paragraphs for basic game description, but I want to take a moment before that and talk about what Raid Manager isn’t. Raid Manager is not a big name premium title churned out by an army of underpaid programmers driven by whip and drum to meet industry standards. Next Phase, from what I can glean, is a very small company. They do not have a huge catalogue of apps, this game stands alone under the Jungyu Lee name. Every single comment on the App Store has been responded to and after just releasing they are already on version 1.7.7. This game oozes passion project and I have to admit I am a sucker for it.

So, now that we are past what it isn’t, what is Raid Manager? You are put into the support role seat of an MMO simulated environment. Your job is to keep your team alive and acquire levels, gear, teammates, and skill points. All of this is encased in an auto-clicker style gameplay loop that admittedly does little to distract from a pretty straightforward sloping power curve that needs to be brute forced whenever your party runs aground against a foe you lose to. Die to a fight? Level up, gear up, grab some more skills and you get to move on to the next fight, so on and so forth. Your abilities include moving your healer around, and tapping and holding down on teammates while the bar at the bottom fills. There are individual abilities that get cast if you stop the bar on them and each ability has a cooldown on it. The pace is frenetic and for the most part you can leave the game on auto-play and see solid success.

Something I found quite amusing about this game is that there are a few accuracies that seem to be purely unintentional. The broken english and repetitive grind make me feel more at home in an asian-style MMO than maybe anything else about this game. I say this with affection but it makes me laugh thinking how close this game is to a spiritual successor of the .hack games. The story line premise that you are operating within a game world is nothing new, but in many iterations, like .hack, the MMO genre is resoundingly unfun, annoying and repetitive. I’ve always wondered if those qualities are a true reflection of the developer’s opinion on online games or if they are simply used as a shortcut to avoid making more complex systems. While it may be a mystery, I do enjoy speculating.

The clicker style gameplay has a few areas of progression. There is the normal raid chain of fights that you slowly become better and better at. Heroic dungeons is an area where you can end up recruiting teammates. Dungeon of Trial rewards currency that lets you improve your skills and talents. The final one I want to mention here is the Gold Dungeon. This one is cool and fun and makes the whole game pretty cool and fun too. So the Gold Dungeon follows the familiar format of running face first into encounter after encounter until you die. The big difference is that you get to recruit extra powerful allies who can help you clear even further than normal. Every time you clear an encounter in Gold Dungeon, it drops epic loot. The BIG wrinkle is that your recruited allies will start a bidding war with you to claim the loot for themselves. Gold Dungeon has an auction system built on top of it and is simultaneously the primary source of loot and gold in the game. Don’t like an item that drops? Drive up the price then have your allies pay you gold for it. It’s a great little system.

Raid Manager isn’t going to compete with big corporate gacha titles. It won’t compete with big name ports and it might not even compete with indie darling games. All those types of games know their marketing, know their audience, and know a lot of the business surrounding game development. This game does have an initial price tag and it does have in game purchases, and yes I know that is a bad thing. The good thing for us is that this game is not designed to force you to make purchases. It’s actually tough to find the purchases in the game and you don’t need them. It actually serves as another reminder this isn’t a corporate money printer. That said though, Raid Manager is not as good as it could be for many of the above reasons, but the bottom line is that it is still a fun game despite itself.

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In The Swords of Ditto, you take on the role of a nameless hero tasked with completing an epic quest to rid your land of an ancient foe who has bested multiple previous sword wielders in aeons past. With d-pad and action buttons in tow, you venture out in search of the big bad evil guy in hopes of liberating the common folk of the land. Ditto unfolds much like a classic Zelda game, with areas unlocking after certain progress points are reached. There is an inventory system for useable items as well as an equipment system where you can equip various stickers to different equipment slots for bonuses. You will need to roll, run, and slash your enemies to defeat them and power up your sword.

The primary adjective that The Swords of Ditto exudes is “Cute". The art is cute, the characters are cute, the enemies are cute and even the stickers you put on your gear are cute. I would say that Ditto compares favorably even to the most adorable ARPG I know, the aforementioned Cat Quest. This is probably the largest selling point for this game to me. A game that manages to encapsulate a sweeping storyline (albeit quite heavily trope-y) into a cohesive art style and a cohesive tone of cuteness is one that deserves recognition. In fact, the only non-cohesive part of the game to me seems to be the item system. While there are the Zelda-esqe items that run off of an energy bar system, there are also a number of consumable bombs and other items that don’t use the energy system. Its a minor quibble but it doesn’t have a solid flow when some of your items can be used indefinitely, and others are just used up after a few uses. Healing items are also one use items as well, and apart from these or leveling up your choices for regaining health are very limited.

The great downfall of The Swords of Ditto has to be the abysmal directional control stick. Now some on our forums argue that the extremely sensitive direction stick is a boon for precision action, but I find the opposite to be true. Unlike games with a proven d-pad functionality like Cat Quest or Brawl Stars, Ditto does not have a fixed d-pad. Instead there is just blank space on the left side of the screen that seems to almost taunt you by forcing you to try to decipher where exactly the dpad is supposed to be. You can tap down, and then slide to one side or another only to find that the character doesnt move or barely moves in that direction. Until you try to re-anchor your finger, you will NOT be moving in that direction. At all.

If the anchor fails weren’t bad enough, the auto-attack redirects are just painful. Your hero starts off with a 3 swing combo that in cases where no directional inputs are made you would either want to continue swiping in the same direction or auto-follow the closest enemy. It seems like this never happens; the moment you cease to give a directional input, subsequent swings veer off in extreme and random directions, ruining your combo and opening yourself up for an enemy’s counter attack. For an ARPG, this is probably the thing that can most easily make or break your game. If you can’t give a player controls that make them feel in control of their character, you don’t have squat.

For a six dollar game, Ditto offers a great amount of content, including a lot of replayability complete with some interesting new game+ mechanics. It’s tough saying I wouldn’t recommend a game I am scoring 3.5/5 but the control scheme is just that bad. This would be an easy 5/5 with an update to the dpad, but it seems unsure at this point if any updates to the game can be expected. Like I said previously, an ARPG lives and breathes based on its control fidelity, and sadly The Swords of Ditto needs work before its an enjoyable game for this writer at least. Many times we see ports that don’t live up to the source and this sadly is one of them.

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Coming into the game for the first time, most players will likely choose to immediately go spelunking, pushing the urge to build a dungeon of their own off until later. That’s entirely understandable. I did it myself, in fact, and was sorely disappointed with what I found. The early adventures were small dungeons, dubiously designed. They were interesting to explore as a first foray into a new game, and borderline boring to play; although that’s not terribly surprising since most loot-based games aren’t particularly interesting early. The problem, though, is that MONOLISK takes quite a while to become interesting. Part of that is due to the player content itself, the other part is due to progression (which we’ll talk about later). Players creating dungeons is a wonderful idea, but its success is entirely dependent on whether or not players can make fun, enjoyable experiences consistently. MONOLISK is confident they can—so confident, in fact, that they are entirely reliant on player content for shards. Unfortunately, it isn’t paying off. Whether it’s lack of publicity for good creations, or simply an absence thereof, it is not easy to find interesting levels.

From the other side, it’s not easy to make that content either! Players who opt to try their hand at building their own shard (MONOLISK’s term for a dungeon) will find a remarkably limited toolkit. Most everything you would expect to have is there, but in very small quantities. Without a fair bit of experimentation, it’s all too likely that the end result of a not inconsiderable amount of time is a poorly thought out, overly long dungeon, nearly barren of hostile encounters. It’s not all the creator’s fault, though, since there aren’t any helpful guides or tutorials on how to go about making something interesting, something exciting to explore, and adequately populating that creation with monsters. This is somewhat mitigated in the future, though, as players get more monsters, and it becomes easier to patch over poor design with fighting.

You’re probably wondering at this point why it takes so long for the game to become interesting. Well, that’s a result of an unfortunate decision in regards to progression. Progress, both as a dungeon creator and an adventurer, is gained with card packs. What are card packs, you’re wondering? Exactly what they sound like, and what you’ve probably seen before in other games. Once you have acquired a certain amount of currency, or enough players have rated your dungeons, you can open a pack. Inside, you may find creatures to place in your dungeons, or skills and gear for your adventurers.

While this seems like a reasonable and unobtrusive way to monetise a game, and it isn’t necessarily a bad idea, it inadvertently disincentivizes dungeon exploration and hampers dungeon creation. See, hunting monsters & opening chests is great and all, but games like Diablo, Borderlands, or even Destiny aren’t appealing because of their amazing gameplay. No, they’re appealing because beating baddies up in the pursuit of bursts of colourful loot is satisfying. Continuing this analogy, pulling that weapon, skill, or high-value shard from a card pack has a similar dopamine rush, but it’s nowhere near as satisfying. It’s like grabbing a handful of candy from a mix bag, rather than smacking a piñata for all those delicious treats.

On the other side of the proverbial wall, dungeon builders don’t have the link between hitting the bad guy and getting awesome loot, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t also hindered by an economy based on card packs. Rather than affecting the fundamental feedback loop, as card packs do with adventuring, they affect something a little more blatant: The tools available to create shards. Opponents, shards types, and higher level shards can only be used after they are unlocked through card packs. At the start, players only have a meagre variety of enemies and tiny shards to develop. Sure, they function as something akin to a tutorial… but a proper tutorial or three would be better all around. Moreover, there’s no guarantee that enough of a single enemy type, or large enough shards to put them to use in a properly themed level, will make an appearance in any reasonable time frame.

As a last kicker, card packs are mixed and contain everything, not only things that haven’t been unlocked already. Maybe you’ve already unlocked all the equipment for one or two adventurers, or maybe you don’t even care about adventuring at all—too bad. All those unlocked items, all that gear you don’t care about in the slightest, is all in there competing with potentially important drops. But hey! At least you can turn those useless cards into dust, right? Dust in MONOLISK is very similar to dust in Hearthstone, with a notable difference: There are two kinds; one for monsters, and one for adventuring equipment. So all those monster cards that keep piling up can only be turned into other monster cards, and all those crappy wands can only be turned into other skills or items. Altogether, progression is slow, and only becomes slower.

Despite its flaws, MONOLISK has potential. It is, as far as I’ve seen, unique, and a great deal of effort has gone into making it impressive. Unfortunately, since progression and player content, the areas it should excel in most, are where it is weakest, that effort feels… insufficient. Where there should be tutorials introducing prospective shard-makers to the tools and how to use them, there is nothing; not even an encouraging, “Good luck figuring it out!" Where there should be an introductory series of shards followed by an interesting and diverse multitude of well-built creations, there are instead abandoned first tries and a morass of content designed to quickly climb meaningless leaderboards. While I wanted to like MONOLISK, and while I am still interested in the idea and how it will be developed, I am not sure I am interested enough to stick around.

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While this sometimes results in amazing games, like the 2018 Yoku’s Island Express, most examples end up as mediocre mash-ups that only gain attention if they’re tied to some beloved character.

The Pinball Wizard (), a mash-up of pinball and dungeon crawling, doesn’t have the luxury of a recognizable franchise tied to its name. However, while it doesn’t achieve the heights of some of the better pinball mashups, it does provide an entertaining, if imperfect, bit of amusement.

The game has a solid foundation and developer Frosty Pop deserves applause for bringing it to fruition in a way that feels intuitive and satisfying. The basics don’t take long to figure out: knock a wizard around using pinball paddles, hit enemies to hurt them, avoid enemy attacks, gather treasure, and find the key on each level to open the door to the next one. Rinse and repeat until you reach the top of the tower, defeat the end boss, and save the day.

The game’s simple graphics are pleasing to the eye, and help aid in the game’s easy-to-pick-up style. How everything in the game works is clear from the moment you lay eyes on it, which speaks well for the artistic direction.

One interesting design choice was to not make the titular wizard look much like a ball. Instead of rolling around the tables, he just kind of hustles around like he’s going for a morning jog, taking paths and speeds that just happen to be the same as how a ball would act when ricocheting off objects on a sloped surface. It sets an off-kilter tone that works quite well for the premise, and the sight of a wizard sprinting face-first into enemies ends up being far more amusing than if he were rolling into everything.

When you die, you have to start back at the last tower entrance you unlocked. For the first few hours of play, this will mean starting back at the very beginning of the game. Dungeon crawlers require progression systems, after all, which means that your character starts out weak, fragile and powerless — ready to die from any angry blob that looks at you funny.

New skills come from gaining experience, and these skills can be upgraded with treasure, but even your ability to collect these things is hindered at the beginning. Upgrades that give you treasure multipliers or increased experience aren’t unlocked until much later in the game, meaning that you have to grind for a while before leveling up becomes a regular occurrence.

The early upgrades do a lot to mix up how the game works — the ability to dash in a chosen direction, shoot out a magical pinball, and recover health by hitting enemies all provide new and interesting choices about how to approach each level. However, the further you progress, the less-interesting the upgrades get. At the end, you’re just increasing your health, energy, and the amount of treasure and experience you get.

Unfortunately, many things about the game lack variety and imagination. Very few of the levels offer interesting layouts or obstacles, instead repeating the same basic structures with differing enemy, item, and paddle locations. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were a lot of different enemy types, but there are only four enemies in the entire game. These enemies are all well-thought-out and require their own unique approaches to defeat, but you can only hit a bomb back at a bat so many times before it becomes tiresome.

On top of this, the game has only one tile set, meaning every level looks the same, and only a single boss that’s pretty directly lifted from the Legend of Zelda series.

Defeating this end boss unlocks a power that gives players extra experience, helping players unlock the rest of the skill tree at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, if my experience is anything to go by, many players will have already unlocked most of the skills by the time they defeat the end boss.

The game does convert experience to gold once all the skills have been unlocked, helping players power up their skills faster, but beating the levels becomes trivially easy long before you reach full power, limiting how engaging the game is to replay.

One the whole, The Pinball Wizard is a solid game that is in desperate need of more. It needs more layouts, more enemies, more obstacles, more powers, more bosses, more locations, and more reasons to keep coming back. Anyone who subscribes to Apple Arcade and likes the idea of a pinball dungeon crawler will find exactly what they’re looking for. It succeeds at being an entertaining diversion, but it could have been more than that.

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(That’s not a joke. That’s actually why Dong Nguyen pulled the game from the app store.)

Thankfully, Fledgling Heroes has a lot more to offer than an endless gauntlet of Mario pipes. Freshman studio Subtle Boom has thought up plenty of ways to alter the oft-copied formula and give Fledgling Heroes an identity of its own.

Right from the beginning, the game treats players to some stylized and charming animations. Combined with dialogue made up entirely of rhyming couplets, it succeeds at creating a cute, light-hearted atmosphere.

The game has a storybook feel, though its story never really goes anywhere. It seems that the story only exists to set a tone and give a thin justification for why birds are flying through danger, avoiding traps, and racing dragons. The game doesn’t need the justification, but it can’t seem to help itself, plugging in narration and character motivations that don’t really do much to string the levels together. It never gets annoying, but it never really gets interesting either, so most players will likely end up ignoring it outright.

The gameplay has plenty of additions that help Fledgling Heroes distinguish itself from the countless Flappy Bird clones that came before it. While the familiar flying formula makes up the core of the gameplay, additional features such as gliding, speed boosts, bouncing off enemies and avoiding traps let the game rise above its predecessor.

The game is split up into three different worlds, themed around a pirate-filled ocean, a magical castle, and a flooded jungle ruin. In each world, players make their way through a branching series of levels via maps that use the old Mario formula: each completed level unlocks more, with occasional forks in the road that allow for different paths to the end boss.

These levels are designed to be played by six different birds. Three of the birds — a parrot, an owl, and a toucan — share the same control scheme. The other three add some variety: there’s a penguin that swims through the water and launches itself into the sky like Free Willy, a quail that runs across the ground and can sort of fly if it flaps its wings like a frantic idiot, and a kingfisher that can dive underwater.

Each level brings its own unique trials, with multiple paths and play styles that switch things up enough to keep the game interesting throughout. New enemies and mechanics are regularly introduced, with level design that makes it fairly easy to figure out how everything works. On occasion, however, the levels pull some cheap shots, resulting in deaths that seem less like the player’s fault and more like the level designer had a bad day and wanted to be a jerk.

From time to time, progress will be blocked by gates that require a certain number of golden feathers to pass. These feathers are found strewn about the levels, and can also be earned by completing certain challenges, like hitting certain objects or finishing a level under a certain time limit.

There’s challenge to be found in hunting down four pots to break in a level, or finding space on the ground to bounce 15 times before reaching the finish line, but these challenges don’t feel tailored to the levels they’re on. They’re just tacked-on objectives that amount to nothing more than busywork. That seems to be their sole purpose: filler that forces players to replay levels a few times before they can progress.

Thankfully, unlocking all the game’s content doesn’t require players to finish too many of these objectives. Accessing every single level in the game only requires about a third of the game’s feathers.

Unfortunately, once the three worlds are finished, that’s all there is to the main game. Only the busywork remains. Hunting down every last feather might have some appeal to completionists, but the levels start growing tiresome after a few playthroughs. There’s no promise of further rewards for hunting down all these feathers, either, so motivation wears thin.

The game does promise more replayability through its “lab," which lets players create and download custom levels. It’s a clear attempt to create a Mario Maker-style community that will release an endless stream of creative content. But the content just doesn’t exist. This comes as no surprise, because the items players can place in their custom levels are also hidden across the game world as part of the completionist slog that the game wants to encourage.

So, Fledgling Heroes ends up in a sad state: a simple but fun game that’s all too short, and attempts to make up for its length by padding it out with pointless challenges and promoting a larger community that will never materialize.

Battle Hunters is a squad based RPG where you command a team of 3 adventurers plunging their way headlong into dungeons, caves, forests and swamps all in an attempt to stop and evil being from taking over the land. Yes a trope this old really doesn’t deserve to be pulled out of retirement but I don’t think we’ll ever stand over its grave and say what a great trope it was. No, in keeping with about 90% of the RPGs out there, you have a bad dude that needs to be killed deader than dead. Luckily many of the characters you can play as have clever designs that allow them to specialize in unique ways. When one of your characters gets low on health there is really no need to wait around or use healing items. Swapping another person into your team will let an injured teammate sit on the side lines and slowly heal. This means the more teammates you collect, the more healing your team can passively dole out.

The balance between the different characters you can play as seems a little lopsided. For instance, some characters have healing abilities that massively increase their survivability with no downside to compensate. Other characters have interesting auto attack effects, or large area affect spells, and some can even summon minions or have high defensive stats. Eventually I settled on keeping any character around that had a healing ability and then others that had minion summoning or high defense. The overall strategy remains the same though regardless of your team. Play keep away from the enemy or hit the defend button until your abilities are ready to be used, and keep your non-melee characters moving around to kite enemies as much as possible.

If you love Battleheart ($3.99) but get frustrated with the reaction time needed to micromanage your team, Battle Hunters provides a very suitable replacement. Just a cursory glance at the user interface of Battle Hunters shows why it draws a comparison to the iOS classic, Battleheart. There are, however, some pretty big differences that warrant a deeper look. While Battle Hunters has a slightly more interesting story line layout and more characters to play as, it completely lacks an inventory for equipable items. It has a more strategic approach to combat since you can pause the action to issue orders to your team, but that complexity is watered down by the lack of items to equip them with.

Battery consumption seems like it may also be an issue. At the time of this review, I’ve found that after each two hours of play I have to retreat to a charging cord to replenish my iPhone 8+’s battery. Load times are a little on the slow side, but not horrible. Ultimately the technical performance of the app could use some improvements but it is stable enough to pass muster. It may be a good idea to look for reviews from your specific device if you have concerns.

What I would ultimately like to see from Battle Hunters is a slightly lighter running app that has meaningful loot or a reason to gather the gold you collect in game. As it is, we have a dungeon delving game without any loot. It just doesn’t make sense to me. If they end up adding a little bit of content I would say it’s a really good game that has the potential to be great if they were to also expand the story line and start to mix in some dynamic story telling aspects, maybe even have some sense of choice or non-linear exploration. As it is, I really have fun in the combat portion of this game. It is a LOT of fun, it just needs more substance to back up the hack and slash. What we have in Battle Hunters is a great frame work for a full fledged gaming experience, but at $5.99 some may expect more.

If you’re looking for a deep narrative experience, NomNoms isn’t it. The premise is simple: an evil enchantress stole all the food-containing eggs and put them out of reach. It’s up to you to help the NomNoms sore to new heights and nom-nom away. Each level includes an egg, five coins/gems, and obstacles. Shoot your chosen NomNom (I love the sparkly-eyed Lucile) from a slingshot at the bottom of the screen. As long as a hatching slot is open, your NomNom just has to graze the egg to snag it. Some obstacles are permanent, but like rules, others are just made to be broken. And it’s easy to know the difference, as any unbreakable blocks look like part of the environment but breakable ones are skinned a bit differently. In some levels, there are cannons to help propel you to the eggs, adding a slight twist to the formula.

Sometimes, rarely, the UI overlaps elements in levels that need to be seen; for example, the coin collector gauge can cover a triangular block that’s needed to redirect your NomNom towards its target(s).

Your NomNoms then need to wait for the egg to hatch and their food (or sometimes a pile of coins) to appear. At this point, you can continue to toss your NomNoms into the air to get any missed coins, or progress to the next level. The problem is, without an open hatching spot, there isn’t much point in trying the next level. So you need to wait, on average about 20 minutes. The game has notifications to draw you back intermittently, but goes radio silent when your egg is ready to hatch. This would be an incredibly useful thing to remind players that the world of NomNoms is ready for them.

The game’s currency is twofold, coins and gems. Coins speed up hatching time. Gems are the premium currency, required to unlock new worlds (just a level reskin that gets mixed into the rotation) or more hatching slots. And here comes the problem: it can take upwards of a week to earn enough gems to unlock a new hatching slot, so you’re essentially limited to one level at a time until the current egg is ready to hatch – and you’ll have to set a timer if you want to know when that happens.

Levels appear in random order, so you can’t go back and replay one if you forgot to grabs any coins or, god forbid, gems. Gems are too difficult to come by without paying – either that, or what they’re used to purchase costs too much. As I stated earlier, it can take up to a week to get the 20 gems needed to open a hatching slot or 25 gems for a new NomNom, and lord knows how long to open a new world at the cost of 100 gems. The worlds aren’t mandatory, but they do add variety to the levels which is a nice feature after you’ve played a hundred of them.

Collecting is key, and the entire reason to play. You collect cute animals, the titled NomNoms, to customize the play experience. You also collect a variety of food stuffs, each assigned a level (common, rare, super rare). If you’re not into collecting, the game may lose appeal rather quickly. But I’m all about catching ’em all, and have a problem leaving tasks incomplete, so I’m all for the collection aspect.

I’ve collected dozens and dozens of foods to date; my favorites include:

• Switzercheese, angry about their holes
• Shroomelle the magic mushroom
• Cornelius the corny
• Endorfino, the endorphin-releasing chocolate bar

My least favourite food is the Oni Girls, who make a rather tasteless joke about racism (which I never find appropriate).

There are certain elements of NomNoms that I have true appreciation for. This is practically unheard of in F2P titles: a skip level button. Watch a short video ad, and skip a level you’re stuck in. It’s easy peasy. And to keep me coming back for more on a regular basis, there are daily rewards of coins and gems. The gems are especially helpful.

I’m not used to a mobile game, even a free-to-play one, that feels so limited in terms of play time (the one egg every 20 minutes thing). The collectibles trickle in, and it will take weeks to get them all – a good thing for F2P titles, keeping players coming back. I expect NomNoms is either the type of game to grab you, or something someone would pick up and delete almost immediately.

The game places you in the role of Organa, Irene’s shop assistant. Irene runs a small, bustling organ shop. As Organa, your main duty is to tend to the greenhouse. It’s a whopper of a job, with several things needing to be done at any given time, but surely Organa (and the player behind her) is able! So why do people come in seeking organs? Placing an organ inside an inanimate object brings it to life, with the soul of the organ. Customers request organs for various reasons, such as the little girl who wants her cat to talk or the farmer who needs a scarier scarecrow.

Before I discuss what I liked (and what I didn’t) as far as gameplay in Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden, I want to give credit to the incredible artwork in the game. Each aspect is done with such a delicate hand, from unique characters to the tiny harvestable organs. If the concept of an organ-growing organic garden didn’t hook me, I’m certain the artwork would have. There is an incredible level of detail in every graphic element. Even the teeny tiny little animals are somehow full of life, and I love zooming in and watching them flit around doing their work.

There is a special ease to the garden workflow. Click all animals, water as much as possible, create mincemeat, rinse and repeat. It’s surprisingly soothing. You’ll go from managing a single kidney tree to balancing several trees, multiple animal species, and other garden tools. The learning curve is reasonably paced, spread out amongst the story events. Trees and tools in your garden have levels, based on usage. New levels mostly increase productivity and sometimes quality. In addition to trees and tools, your garden will be home to several species of animals, each helping in its own way. For example, frogs fill your watering can and moles increase organ production.

Organa’s time is spent mostly in the garden (except when tending shop or speaking with Irene), where she has to:

• Water trees to increase organ production and quality.
• Activate small animals.
• Collect organs of varying quality to complete quests.
• Click the door (black and white means its inactive, when it’s ready it becomes coloured in) to advance in the story.
• Pickle ripe organs.
• Create mincemeat from unripe organs.

Screen real estate is especially sparse in the garden, yet a long banner remains in the upper left corner. Its full text states: “Trace organs to harvest them. Touch objects to show their explanations and parameters." But the banner scrolls and the beginning gets chopped off, not returning until you do something in the garden and scrolling away quickly. This information would be better off in a one-time pop-up early in the game, or just elsewhere in the menus. It doesn’t need to cover up actual items in the garden.

I do have a few other issues with interface choices. Navigation and selection often relies on tapping tiny dots, a difficult feat with my stumpy fingers (thanks, dad) and an iPhone 8. I assume the experience is less frustrating on devices with larger screens. And the game plays in landscape mode, making it impossible to play with one hand – a must for clicker-type titles. Graphically, I understand the decision, as the garden simply would not work in portrait mode… but still, it’s an annoyance.

Direction for what to focus on (after all, you can’t water all plants fully at one time!) comes from the quest list, with story quests being listed first and garden tasks afterwards. The quest list becomes a bit aggressive, with more tasks than anyone could complete at one time. I counted 21 at one point. These tasks often overlap, such as asking for three different quality combinations for a single organ. Limiting to one task per organ wouldn’t solve the problem, though, as there are issues with the quest list as it relates to your current levels. For example, I had a quest asking for a superior type of kidney long before I had the ability to create one. A more streamlined quest list would have absolutely had a positive impact on my experience with the game.

You will easily get several hours of play fromForget Me Not‘s storyline. Its description promises you can continue playing past the story’s conclusion, but I struggle to find the point in doing so. It’s fine being confined to the story, you can always replay it. The story isn’t terrible heavy, but does successfully give purpose to what you’re doing in the garden. Still, the game is more waiting and watering than reading dialogue (thankfully).

In the end, Forget Me Not: My Organic Garden is a delightfully active addition to the tapping genre, bringing it into the premium game world instead of setting it adrift amongst throngs of free-to-play titles. The artwork is the superstar, absolutely darling and always intriguing. The story is a bit light, but there’s nothing wrong with that when the purpose is to work in a garden. And the gardening itself is streamlined, logical, and a pleasure to play. The issues I have with the title – usually UI-related – certainly detract a bit from the parts I loved, but the game is still well worth a playthrough (or two).

Similar to those two games, Revue Starlight Re LIVE arrived on this side of the pond only around 9 months after the original 12-episode anime premiered. You’ll excuse me for never having heard of it before the game’s localization announcement, but having the show launch on HIDIVE rather than the more readily available Crunchyroll meant knowing of it outside of the U.S. was probably asking a bit much.

I’m writing this review not long after the game asked me to leave one on its App Store page. These games can go on forever, so if a few hours in is when the developers have essentially shown me their hand, then so be it.

Unlike Bushiroad’s other mega-popular idol games, Revue Starlight Re LIVE isn’t a rhythm game. While it’s primarily a turn-based RPG, it does feature a healthy amount of songs originally performed by the headline girls. Tapping along to the beat won’t affect your performance in-game, but adoration of the tracks will obviously add to your overall enjoyment when your chosen song kicks in to signal your team’s buffed up combat potential.

Using the very same Live2D animation style used in the BanG Dream mobile game, the big and peppy cast of characters comes to life with expressive animations and facial features that adds a welcome touch to the traditionally flat visual novel-style method of storytelling. Not that I can really tell you what the story is about, though. These aren’t the kinds of idols you’d see at the Hollywood Bowl; they’re theatre girls.

Rather than jam along to the background track and winning over their fans, these girls are being whisked away to slash, shoot, and bash demons hell-bent on stealing the “brilliance" they need to stop the world from forgetting their craft. They’re trying their darndest to stay relevant in the ever-changing world of entertainment. It’s probably too deep for a theatre novice like me to understand. But as a cinephile, I understand their plight. Things kick off rather suddenly, and seeing these high school girls take up arms against rival schools had me scratching my head.

Given Bushiroad’s other games focusing on nothing but song and dance, watching these girls chop each other down while retaining the cute and stylish charm players crave from their all-girl anime franchises, it was clear to me that knowledge of the anime would go a long way. There are a lot of names and faces to remember very early on. Then again, anime school girls have become fighter jets and rolled through fields in tanks before, so this more down to earth setting probably won’t surprise the waifu veterans out there.

Just be prepared for a pretty lackluster gacha animation by today’s standards. The animation is minimal, the “memoirs" applied to Stage Girls are uninspired anime stills, and the more unique stuff just looks low-res compared to some other high-profile releases.

Combat is handled a little differently to most other turn-based RPGs. Rather than a fluid reactionary button mash as characters dish out their attacks, things go at a slightly slower pace here.

Similar to a card game system, the Stage Girls you bring with you into battle are displayed as panels with individual skills and resource costs. You slot these into your attack queue in the order you want them to strike, press start, and watch the round go by before heading back to the input screen to do it all over again.

Once a character has dealt or taken enough damage, they slip into the unfortunately named “Climax Revue" to unleash their own powerful moves or pair up with compatible characters for some gorgeous unison attacks. Stages, like the Main Story or PvP, consist of waves, so mopping up one set of enemies will usually move you onto the next until either side is down for the count.

The tutorial teaches you the “how" but fails to give the reasons “why", meaning that while you can complete most of the game’s first chapter with the Auto button, you’ll eventually need to start reading your roster and devising some actual strategies before long.

Outside of combat, there’s not a whole lot to do here. The game’s main story plays out this way, and you’ll be bouncing between the stories of each of the four schools involved and their own Revue groups as one unlocks the next.

Powering up Stage Girls takes a mish-mash of currencies and trinkets and can add stages, boost their max level, and upgrade skills. Players of games like Summoners War, Food Fantasy, and Skylanders: Ring of Heroes will find this all alarmingly familiar – it’s basically a universal system at this point that rewards tiring daily devotion with slow progression. We get it.

But Revue Starlight Re LIVE doesn’t forgo what made it enough of a hit to bring the game to the west – character interactions. The “My Theatre" feature is almost identical to the BanG Dream counterpart in which its countless characters (now reduced to chibi form) chill out and chat in more personal side-story conversations. You can, and will, spend your currencies decorating the space and upgrading stat-boosting furniture, but it’s checking in the game’s cast that’s bound to be the main attraction here.

Revue Starlight Re LIVE is a difficult title for me to get behind having been more or less completely oblivious to the existence of the source material. The battles aren’t quite as involved as I’d hoped, but it’s clear the ATeam, the game’s developers, wanted all eyes to be on the flashy attacks and character synergies on the stage. It’s just a shame most of what we see here has already been done to death elsewhere.

Going off what we’ve seen already, each new gacha set will change a character’s outfit, combat role, and their attack animations, giving players a little more than a simple collectible photo with each pull. It’s an exciting prospect that will mean a whole lot more to someone who’s already invested in the franchise. As you’d expect from any similar idol game, the continued allure of this particular time sink is going to ride on how it satisfies each player’s burning desire to be closer to their chosen “waifu".

Fortunately, “disappointment" can hardly be used to describe any immediate aspect of gameplay: The strategy behind selecting and removing cards to best improve the odds of success, weighing one relic’s value against another, and planning out a general path from start to boss are all impactful mechanics and feel well designed. The fundamental mechanics and immediate feedback are all positive and range from well done to acceptable… so where, then, does it fall flat?

Its flaws are quickly noticed, although understanding why they are bad is a little more complex. After completing the tutorial, players are sent to the main screen and tacitly encouraged to look around. Following this advice, players are introduced to the other characters, the majority of which are unlockable by simply playing. Character unlocks start at one thousand gold and increase (ignoring the Admiral, who must be unlocked for $5 of real money). Moreover, all characters after the Sword Master require a minimum reputation of five hundred. Not a big deal, right? Gold can’t be terribly difficult to acquire—repute is probably the real bottleneck. That’s a fair assumption… but, unfortunately, wrong. A quick look at the shop reveals gold for purchase, various boosts (some of which are permanent upgrades) available for a few thousand gold or more, and card booster packs. Okay, maybe the gold rewards are inflated to compensate. It wouldn’t be the first game to do so! But, moving to the play screen reveals three chapters: The first (which is aesthetically similar to the tutorial), and two additions which cost five thousand gold each. In addition to the gold cost, the second chapter requires a minimum of five hundred repute; the third, two thousand. Large numbers are not the exception, they are the norm.

Really, such high numbers wouldn’t even be that bad if completing a voyage offered a few hundred gold as reward. Unfortunately, they simply are not. After finishing two consecutive stages, the gold reward tends to be between one hundred and one hundred fifty gold at most. While the content for a good fifteen or more hours of play is there, it is locked behind painfully high walls. As such, long-term play in Pirates Outlaws is not one great achievement after another, it is a slog. For a game that feels like it wants to be pirate Faster Than Light mixed with single-player Hearthstone, it simply doesn’t deliver enough satisfying progression to incentivise an extensive amount of replayability.

In contrast to the progression, the actual gameplay—killing pirates, optimising the card deck, and plotting a path to the boss—is solid. Each battle is a puzzle requiring strategy and a dash of luck to not only beat the opponents, but beat them with enough health to continue on. While the initial stage can be difficult at times, the real challenge comes from the boss fight at the end. While the fight changes each voyage, the opponent is always a hulking beast of a man sporting far more health, damage, and sometimes armour, than the player. Passing this battle requires careful thought for a skilled player, and no small amount of luck for a poor deck. Should players surmount this obstacle, they are presented with the choice of continuing their voyage—retaining their current action points, deck, relics, and character—or calling it quits and returning to port. Continuing offers the chance of even greater rewards, although the odds are certainly stacked against the player. Returning to port offers the safety of immediately banking gold and repute, which is no doubt a boon for the risk-adverse.

Stage one can only provide so much entertainment and practice, however. Pressing on is a necessity for any kind of substantial progress. For those brave enough to enter stage two, there are new enemies, bosses, and relics available. For those who are able to beat them, and enter stage three… the greatest challenge yet available awaits. While the difficulty in enemies cannot be understated, there is more to it than that: Each successive stage magnifies poor decisions in the prior levels. Continuing on with insufficient action points may result in an inopportune demise with no tavern in sight; taking too many risks in previous battles or events may tax not only the easily replenishable health points but the health maximum as well. Taking every card and discarding none will quickly result in a bloated deck with no easy way to access the necessary cards in a difficult fight. In short, caution and a certain amount of planning is required to travel far with any measure of success.

The basic gameplay fundamentals, while enjoyable, do not entirely make up for the poor progression. As such, Pirates Outlaws is merely a decent game instead of a great game. Turning it into a great game—that is, unlocking the characters and/or chapters based on difficult achievements instead of gold—would require no small amount of effort from the developers, however, and so is certainly not likely to happen.

As such, while it is a fun little game to fill five minutes here or ten minutes there, it isn’t something that is likely to last long-term. While the basic gameplay is fun, the visuals are beautiful, and the broader gameplay loop is enjoyable, the reward system simply isn’t there and it really shows. Perhaps this will change in the future but, more likely, it will not, and the grind for gold will drag Pirates Outlaws down, down to the dark abyss below.

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Fortunately, Radian Games is here to lend their expertise in unique twists with the just released Scorcher ($2.99). With its minimalist visuals, an upbeat soundtrack, and intuitive controls; Scorcher, in a unique take, brings a giant sandworm to the marathon. I can’t say that I’ve seen that before!

Songs seem to develop and change with distance travelled. Since I have yet to break twenty thousand meters on any canyon save one, I suspect that I have not heard the complete list. What I have listened to, however, I have enjoyed—the upbeat music is welcome company in a desert canyon where sandworms and sandsharks are prowl. The sound effects, on the other hand, are lacking. While certain UI elements have sound effects, and they are good, many things that I expect to have sounds associated with them, and probably should, do not. Interactions like jumping, bumping into a canyon wall, bumping into a worm, crashing, catching a shark, eating a shark… the list goes on. While I cannot entirely rule out simply missing them (though it is quite unlikely), they would have to be very quiet for that to be the case. More likely, they are simply not there.

Visually, we have a pleasing minimalist style with a crazy amount of particle effects. Dirt trails following the sandsharks? Check. Sand flying from the tunneling sandworm? Of course. Plasma, flames, and debris from behind the ship? I thought you’d never ask! These touches offer a certain visual flair where the style becomes a little too repetitive, and provide a sense of momentum to accentuate the displayed speed without detracting from readability. There seems to be minor framerate issues when large quantities of particles are visible at once, however. Nothing too bad, but it’s a little annoying when it happens.

While the art style is unchangeable, there is an option to adjust the viewing angle. By default, the camera is angled slightly—so there’s a nice view down the canyon, and the walls are a little sloped. This can be changed to a top-down view, however, which somewhat reduces the amount of visible canyon in favour of more defined edges. Practically speaking, the effect on gameplay is negligible. Having well defined walls is a boon for a few maps, particularly Silicon (the first level), but seeing just a bit further and knowing what’s coming up can (and usually does) help more. In the end, though, it just comes down to personal preference.

Controls are responsive, although they take a bit of adjustment. The initial idea is to navigate with a thumb at the bottom of the screen, and that can certainly be done with a different sensitivity or control scheme, but the default is set to absolute finger position—meaning the best place for your finger is directly on the ship itself, not the bottom of the screen. This took a few attempts for me to figure out, but it made a huge difference once I did. Go figure, right? For players who prefer to dodge canyon walls with a ship instead of their finger, there is an option in the menu to change from an absolute scheme to a relative scheme, along with two additional sensitivities (High, and Max). There are also options for jumping—the default is to jump on lifting the finger, but that can be changed to a swipe towards the bottom of the screen, or jumping on a secondary tap. Furthermore, an alternate jump can be assigned to any of the two remaining options, or completely unassigned.

All that said, however, Scorcher is hard. Changing the camera angle may help in a few situations where the walls aren’t clear enough, or when you need to see just a bit further to avoid those mines, or plan around a worm, but it isn’t a magic bullet. Neither is changing the control scheme, although that can certainly help as well. Between the frequently tight corridors, unpredictable worms, and high speeds, this game is difficult. It will take a few tries to beat most canyons, and several more to go beyond just “beating” them. Fortunately, for those of us who just can’t crack a level, there are two possible conditions to unlock the next: Total meters travelled (usually one hundred thousand meters), and meters travelled in a single run (typically ten thousand meters). One hundred thousand meters is quite an accomplishment on a single level, however, so I found it was usually easier to just play it a few times and eventually push past the ten thousand meter bar.

In addition to unlocking new canyons, there is another game mode for those intrepid enough to break twenty thousand meters in a single run, or hit ten thousand meters in the final canyon: The sandworm. This has been something I’ve mentioned quite a bit, and for good reason! It’s a pretty neat creature. More than simply an obstacle to overcome as a ship, players are able to take up the mantle of the sand-tunneling, shark & ship eating, giant worm and race to munch sharks. The number of sharks required for a healthy worm starts at a neat forty sandsharks in the first canyon and increases to whopping sixty in the final canyon—a goal not easily met, but nonetheless achievable. The usual failure condition of ship destruction does not apply for the worm—there are no other worms, and walls do not inflict damage; instead, they are merely a significant speed bump. Intead, these levels are “failed” by not eating enough sharks before time runs out. That hard two minute time limit, while appreciated for short games, is a bit tedious to work around for unlocking new ships. Worse, the worm plays the same on everything from Silicon, to Obsidian, to Ferridox; the only notable difference are mines introduced in Obsidian which, funnily enough, are edible.

Unfortunately, unlocking new canyons, ships, and the worm for each canyon is the majority of the game’s content. While there are achievements (which are accumulated through normal play), they are the whipped cream on an apple pie—tasty, but not essential. Unlocking the different ships, maps, and worms can be done fairly quickly; after that, there is little to do save push for high scores and hunt achievements. While that can certainly be appealing for some, more “game” would be an improvement. To be sure, I’m not complaining about the gameplay itself! Dodging walls, jumping worms, and catching sharks is a solid game loop, but there needs to be a bit more replayability. While this issue can be somewhat alleviated with more ships, more canyons, or more achievements, none of those are permanent fixes. What is missing, and needed desperately, is a system which encourages replayability.

All things considered, this feels like an excellent starting point for a game that could be really, really cool—given some time to implement additional systems for replayability. On release, as it stands? Great for a few hours of total play, but there just isn’t much here for much more. While I can see this potentially becoming quite a fun endless runner with a dash of Star Wars pod racing, and while I believe it will get there eventually… it isn’t there yet.

Overall, Scorcher is a really good game by Radiangames that’s a single update away from being a great game. Radiangames has a fantastic record of supporting their games on the App Store, which makes Scorcher a easy recommendation even with my complaints.

And this feeling of wonder wasn’t lost upon logging in for the first time, either. A relatively robust character creator allows you to make the “ranger” of your choosing. There aren’t any additional races to choose from other than your standard high-fantasy human, but there’s plenty of hairstyles, voice types, and body sliders to mess around with. Confirm your selects and you’re good to go. Again, first impressions were high. After a brief introduction, you’re thrown into what could be your new home for quite some time depending on what you like in your mobile action-RPGs and the kinds of similar games you’ve played in the past. Rangers of Oblivion is, to me at least, a testament to how far mobile graphics have evolved in such a small amount of time. Coming from the cutest 2D appeal of the last game I reviewed here at TouchArcade, Rangers of Oblivion was on a whole other level in the visual department.

Characters are undeniably more detailed than the keep walls barricading you in the safe spots of the Rangers of Oblivion overworld, but it’s a large and visually pleasing environment to see squashed into the confines of your alarmingly high-resolution mobile display. The optional HD texture pack will augment this further, but certain object textures will continue to look like an afterthought, and no amount of additional texture layering will make up for some of the game’s lacking geometry. It’s obvious NetEase wanted to focus your phone’s resources on more dynamic models like NPCs, player characters, and the monsters you’ll spend much of your time wailing on in the future; but the Overworld remains vast and inoffensive for the most part.

For those with more (or less) capable devices, there’s a decent selection of graphical options to get the game running to your own personal standard. High FPS mode can be found in a separate tap to shed the automatic 30fps limit, and you can even bump up the render resolution to better match your display. The game ran shockingly well on both my Pixel 2 XL and HUAWEI MediaPad M5 on max settings, so I can only expect the more optimized iOS devices to run like a dream. Just know that player character pop-in does cause some annoying little stutters in hubs, but shouldn’t be present in fights.

Once I stopped lusting over the visuals, however, my early thoughts of running this review as a direct comparison to Capcom’s Monster Hunter series came to an abrupt end. Rangers of Oblivion appears to stylize itself more on the MMO formula, with quest chains and countless markers quickly filling up the mini-map. Given how hardcore Monster Hunter fans can sink hundreds of hours into Capcom’s flagship series, the seemingly endless quest markers and level-ups felt alien to me.

Thankfully one thing that hasn’t changed here is how you pick your class. Unlike most other RPGs, you’re not locking into a combat style or “class” from the get-go, and you don’t need to start from scratch to try out something new. Your moveset is completely dependant on the weapon type you equip. You’ll pick one of these to train with at the very start of the game, but you’re given a full set immediately after and are free to craft the six different types of weapons and their preferred armor sets at will. Greatsword, lance, bow, twin blades, staff, and gauntlets are your options here. Some of these will sound familiar to fans of the genre, but know that the staff is more like a wizard’s wand than a Wukong stick-swinging kind of deal. There’s some magic to be cast here.

Combat is simple enough for the most part. Whether against small animals or the game’s signature “behemoths", your attacks remain the same. Rather than complicated combos, your strikes depend on your weapon choice and are mapped to the left thumb portion of the screen. You’ll have 3 of these abilities to mash outside of your normal attack, but it isn’t always clear whether you’re supposed to hold the abilities down or simply tap and let go; and with no in-game reference to fall back on that I could find, forgetting how your abilities work will either require a little trial and error, or a quick trip back to the weapon trainer. Anything other than your normal attack is on a strict – if short – cooldown, so knowing which attack to use and when will be the key to efficiently smacking down large monsters.

Before long, however, you’ll gain what’s known as a Wild Soul along with the ability to level it up by feeding it other Wild Souls harvested from behemoths. You’ll choose your initial Wild Soul in much the same way you chose your weapon, but one of its three abilities will always be same as the rest – a handy heal. You can only equip one Wild Soul at a time, with its abilities appearing on a pop-out menu above your own to use in a pinch and can range from increased attack damage for your allies, to the ability to freeze a monster in time. Last but not least in the ability to grapple a large monster and throw it to the ground with enough rapid taps. Large monsters in Rangers of Oblivion has highlighted weak points – like legs and tails – that can be repeatedly struck for extra damage. Once they’ve taken enough damage, the limb will break off, causing the monster to fall to the ground for a period of time. The Wild Soul grapple move, once charged, can lead to another rapid knock-down for your team to exploit.

And that’s what you’ll be doing during most of your time in Rangers of Oblivion. Outside of a few select quests, the main gig here is identifying materials you need to craft new gear and going out into the world to smash the monster needed to earn them. After a few hours with the game, I decided it was taking a little too long to introduce some genuinely awe-inspiring monsters to fight; and judging by the mission list available to skim over, it probably never will.

Monsters aren’t quite on the same scale as other games, and their names leave a leave a lot to be desired, too. Fights are somewhat entertaining, but they’re hardly the tense brawls veterans of the genre would come to expect. With above average visuals, practically full – and surprisingly decent – English voiceover, and plenty of quests to get stuck into, it’s just a shame the core monster slaying aspect of the game feels like an afterthought. Hunts are what deplete the game’s equivalent of an energy meter, however, so you’re free to roam around the hubs when you’re running high and dry. Just don’t expect to get many of the gathering quests done until you’ve replenished your hunting vouchers.

Rangers of Oblivion is bound to entice those with limited experience in the genre, and it’s a great opportunity to dip your toes in the field. But the lack of truly terrifying monsters and subtitles that regularly deviate from the words coming from your speakers, it’s difficult to truly immerse yourself in the world NetEase and GTArcade has attempted to build. There’s plenty to see and do, but only newcomers may want to stick out the ride.

You play as an old fellow named Obe who is off on his final journey. Before he gets too far into it, he finds a lantern that apparently has some special properties. When Obe uses it to cast shadows, certain things around him change. That power is the key to moving forward in most levels, revealing switches, hidden paths, and even unseen entities. Obe will travel through several different areas, each consisting of five stages. You’ll occasionally get a little story segment that is more often than not both well-animated and somewhat confusing. The graphical variety is quite strong, with everything from hellish landscapes to quaint villages serving as the settings for your travails.

Obe can’t do much more than walk around, serve as a weight for switches, and shine his light. You’ll be able to manipulate certain objects in the environment, though you sometimes need to be standing on a particular switch to do that. Most of these objects are used to change the way your light shines on the environment, but some of them are used as good old-fashioned paperweights or methods of transportation as well. Generally speaking, the first thing you’ll want to do when you enter a level is to shine your light around and see what the shadows reveal. Sometimes it’ll be something subtle, like a switch or a single chunk of platform that bridges an otherwise impassable gap. In some levels, it’ll be like peeking into a whole other world. In either case, knowing what the shadows are hiding is vital to finishing the level.

There are 35 stages in total, and each one typically takes a few minutes to clear once you’ve figured out what to do. There are a few that will take you a little bit longer, but a lot of that is contingent on whether or not you can pick up on what the puzzle actually is. Where Shadows Slumber presumes you’re already quite familiar with the puzzle genre on the whole, introducing types of puzzles that will not be explained or hinted at and will only be used for a single stage. There’s no slow build of challenge here, but rather a random scattershot of puzzle game tropes. On the one hand, it gives the game a lot of variety, but on the other, it makes for a somewhat weak experience since it doesn’t really expand on its concepts. Even the core gameplay element, manipulating shadows, doesn’t get more complex or interesting in the 30th stage than it was in the 3rd. The last stage hints at greater promise, but even it resorts to a gimmick that you’ve never seen before and may not even notice until you paw at the screen in frustration.

The game controls as you would expect, with you tapping the screen where you want Obe to move. You can double-tap to make Obe move quicker, which is a very nice feature that more games need to include. I pretty much always want my character to run in these kinds of games. Objects can be moved around by touching them and dragging them, though it sometimes takes a little jiggling to figure out exactly how they’re meant to work. Obe can be a little bit fiddly sometimes, moving when you’re trying to move an object, or going past where you meant him to go, with doors being a particular problem, but there’s not really any pressure to move quickly in the game, so it’s more of a mild annoyance than anything. Some of the movable objects express similarly fidgety controls, something that only causes serious irritation in stages where you’re trying to herd an NPC.

Where Shadows Slumber has a lot going for it. Early on in the game, it felt almost as magical as Monument Valley, albeit with a very different feel. Its more traditional style of puzzle design hinted at a game that offered greater mechanical satisfaction, as well. But as the game came to a close and the credits rolled, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by the whole thing. It’s just a very inconsistent game all-around. Puzzle mechanics are introduced and tossed out with no warming up or expansion. The story seems to want to build towards a particular message, then waves it off in the ending. Sometimes you can ride movable objects, sometimes you can’t. Objects can sometimes be moved without standing on a switch, except when they can’t be. None of this hangs together as well as it should, outside of the presentation, which is consistently excellent.

That’s not even getting into the bugs, and my friends, this game has plenty. The title card for the stage will sometimes stick around, forcing you to restart the game. It has a nasty tendency to crash when you try to reset the stage, and I even sometimes had crashes occur when traveling through doors. The game auto-saves after every stage, but there aren’t any mid-stage saves, so having a crash occur that forces you to retrace your steps is a real possibility. Curiously, the game seemed to express more bugs when I played through it a second time. For a game that’s only a few hours long, the sheer number of times I had to hard-close the game and restart it really is baffling.

It’s unfortunate because Where Shadows Slumber gets a lot of things right. The pace is pretty good, the game looks and sounds great, and on an individual level some of the puzzles are fun to untangle. The games shines with potential, and that does take it a good distance. As such, I’d probably still recommend the game, even if I can’t do so as enthusiastically as I would have liked to. It’s buggy, the design feels inconsistent, and the story keels over at the last minute, but you may want to put up with all of that if only to get at the bits that work.

So, you’re a cube. These things happen sometimes. You’ve got two yellow sides, two red sides, and two blue sides, with each pair of matching colors handily painted on opposite sides from one another. All you can do is roll in one of four directions along the level’s grid. Fortunately, that’s all you have to do. You’ll see that some of the grid squares are filled in with a color. It could be red, blue, or yellow. It may even be purple, orange, or green. Your goal is to run over all of those grid squares, making sure that you’re touching them with the appropriate side of your cube. Match the colors up right, and the grid square will be left empty. Clear them all, and congratulations, you finished a level.

At first, you’ll only have one gameplay mode to play. The Challenge Mode has you run through 100 pre-built stages, earning the requisite three stars based on how well you solve each level. As you earn stars, you’ll unlock various cosmetic skins for the colored squares. There are quite a few, but if you’re pretty bad at the game and can’t rack up the stars, you’re not really missing out on anything too important. All you need to do to move forward is just beat the level, and you can frankly trial-and-error your way through even the most difficult of them given enough time. There’s always a proper route through, however, and finding it in each stage is the key to the fun here. Do that and you’ll have a nice smooth roll through the level, putting together a hefty combo and earning a high score.

Well, that’s provided you don’t have any control misfires, anyway. KataKoto is played from an isometric viewpoint, so it’s not always clear exactly which way you need to swipe to move. All you’ll lose from a wrong move is a little time, but time is of the essence in order to keep your combo going and make the most of the ace up your sleeve, the Wipe Out. As you clear the grid, a meter up in the corner will fill up. Once it’s full, you’ll enter Wipe Out mode, where everything comes up cube. Your cube will become one solid color, and all of the remaining filled grid squares will change to match it. You can clear out problematic areas or boost your score while Wipe Out is in effect, but it only lasts a short time. If the controls fail you here, you will definitely lose out on getting the best score possible.

As you play through the Challenge Mode, you’ll eventually unlock the game’s other mode, Survival. In Survival Mode, you have to a randomized set of stages in a timed challenge. There are three courses of three different difficulty levels, and you’ll need to play through the entire Challenge Mode to unlock the third and final course. In Survival Mode, you’ll earn extra time by putting together combos, so it’s more important than ever to find the golden path through each stage. Aimlessly wandering around too much will end your run in short order. Clear all of the Survival courses and the Challenge Mode stages with three stars, and you’re all done with the game.

The visuals are simple and clean, the sound effects are satisfying, and the music is surprisingly good. KataKoto isn’t one of those games that you play purely for the aesthetics, but once you’re at the proverbial party, you’re not going to mind the atmosphere. The game is free to play, and indeed there is nothing you can buy at all even if you wanted to. Instead, you’ve got mandatory video ads that pop up every five levels in the Challenge Mode, and every ten levels in the Survival Mode. It’s a bit annoying that you can’t get rid of them by buying an IAP or something, but given how few people apparently buy such IAPs, I guess I can’t blame the developer for passing on including one.

KataKoto isn’t going to last you a very long time, but it’s engaging enough to keep you busy for a couple of hours at least. There’s no real reason to come back to the game after you’ve cleared all of the stages, which is perhaps the biggest weak point in the whole affair. The sometimes-fussy controls can be a bit of a bummer, and you’ll have to deal with the semi-frequent video ads, too. If you can cope with all of that, you might want to tumble KataKoto around in your brain for a bit. As puzzle games go, it’s a bit on the breezy side, but that might just be what the mood calls for sometimes.

While you focus on moving your plane across the screen to avoid obstacles and enemies, your plane will be shooting automatically as well. The firepower will depend on the plane you have and upgrades because you gain levels over time and new abilities, however much of this is done through IAPs.

You have three hearts or hits before your plane blows up and you lose. However, you can continue once per stage and this will cost you either an ad (which I will go into below) or 100 coins. Coins and hearts are the main currency in the game and you can get coins by flying over them in mid-air during your battles. I am not exactly sure how the hearts are gained, but in general the better you do in-game the more you have unless you watch ads or make IAPs.

The game is free to play, but very IAP heavy. In fact, after a while you will run out of hearts to even play a game unless you make a purchase of nine or more of them, or wait for the timer to count down to zero on the main menu. Even then, however, you only gain one additional heart and it takes multiple to start a game.

The other thing the game does is it forces you to watch ads to continue your game after your plane blows up. You gain one continue like this on every map or level. You can pay 100 coins for it or watch a 30-second ad. You can also watch 17-30  second ads in order to gain additional hearts or coins from the shop menu.

Although Aero Smash is very much an IAP and ad heavy game, it isn’t done in an overtly obtrusive way. Meaning, you will not see ads popping up on the main play screen as you shoot down baddies. I made a purchase of $2.99 (even though I wasn’t planning on it and tried taking a screen grab to which the game made the purchase for me as I have touch ID enabled) to disable ads, but the game still forces them on through various means (discussed above). I think the differnce after my IAP is that in order to use up my continue during a round, I can pay 100 coins instead of having to watch an ad.

Either way, unless you are a very skilled player, you will need to make some purchases for hearts or coins, especially if you want to upgrade planes or customize the game content. There is also a present feature that you can tap on from the main menu after a timer runs down to 0 and it will grant you some coins or hearts, among other prizes.

Getting back to the gameplay and presentation, Aero Smash is a very pretty game to look at. It has nice visual effects and bright colorful graphics. The graphics almost appear voxel-like with voxel style fighter planes of various sizes and turrets with homing missiles being the norm. The music on the other hand, isn’t anything to write home about. There are also a wide variety of levels that get picked randomly from the main menu when you press play. Some of them range from Star Wars-inspired themes with tie fighters and the like to themes similar to Capcom’s classic 1942.

On the upper right hand side you also have a gauge that fills up and when it does a boss will appear you will have to shoot down or avoid over a length of time as you gain the high score. It is quite difficult though to even get into a boss mode due to how many times you will probably die in mid level.

This is because the majority of bullets you have do not shoot at a constant rate, but in spurts. You also have a bomb icon you can click on and a lightning command (three per level). The bomb icon will send an ally plane (B-52 bomber) down to bomb the ground from above in front and help you take some enemies down while the gush command will make you fly invincibly and fast for a split second taking enemy planes in front of you down.

The game is frentic and can be fun if you overlook its downfalls in terms of an iffy control scheme and the IAP/ads it throws at you. The graphics and preentation is well done although there is no story to speak of. At the end of the day Aero Smash is simply an arcade experince at heart, and one that’s free to try out for those who are curious.

You play the role of a cube as you swipe your way across 55 levels. The game’s art direction, and overall aesthetics, are very tranquil and surreal. It has a neon light vibe to it with geometric shapes moving around in the background. The graphics are pleasant, but repetitive.

Almost There is free to play and at first I thought that it offers very unobtrusive IAPs. These IAP’s, which you can purchase inside the ‘shop’ will allow you to unlock additional level ahead of time. The game’s progression is measured by stars, which you can purchase in various bulks.

You can also earn stars by progressing throughout the levels yourself and the faster you progress, the more stars you earn. As long as you pass to the exit you get a star and depending on your speed, you can earn up to two additional stars. To access the next level you will have to pay a single star. Oh and did I mention you can always watch an ad for a star?

However, as I kept playing I realized that the game also has this weird energy system and not just stars that may halt your progression. After a while you will either have to make an IAP or watch an ad to overcome the energy roadblock and progress deeper into the game. These nags aside, the game is not a micro-transaction hell by any stretch of the imagination.

Because I was playing on the iPad’s larger display, I felt the best way to control the game was via the thumb rather than the forefinger. This may be natural for iPhone users, but many of us iPad gamers use our forefingers in a lot of games. Either way, the game is very playable on the touchscreen.

The one thing that is a bit annoying with the control scheme is that in order to do a long jump you will have to run for a while in one direction until you see a split-second flash, and this can be a bit disorienting. It is easy to jump too quickly and fall because you will have to wait for this flash to know you have reached the appropriate speed burst to jump.

Once you get used to this, it all blends together well as usually it hits by the time you reach the ledge’s edge anyway. You will have to sometimes go backwards, or left, when on a platform to have enough room to speed up for these kind of long jumps. However, if you have been playing platformers over the years, like Mario with its run button, it should be second nature.

The other thing to note about the game’s control scheme is that you can actually cling onto the side walls and, as you slowly fall, wall jump in the opposite direction. This skill takes some practice though as your finger will be shifting back and forth to fling to specific spots through the slider.

Almost There is a pretty challenging platformer. The game is not too dissimilar from titles such as Super Meatboy, but the control scheme really makes it stand out. The challenge in a way has more to do with mastering the strange and different control method, however, rather than the level layout. But the level layout is not bad at what it aims to do: give you a nice challenge mastering obstacle courses with jumps, runs and quick finger actions (letting go of the finger at the right time while flinging above a platform or sideways from a ledge).

The game has a lot of small nuances like this that separate it from most other platformers, besides its one-finger control scheme. It has variations to its gamplay, which is nice, as well as descent level design.

Almost There’s title has a lot of truth to it. This game is really almost there in being a touchscreen-defining platformer. It controls well, is challenging and fun to play. It’s just too bad it is a bit on the short side and offers little customizability — especially with the slider. If you could lower the slider intensity, it would be as playable on iPad as other iOS devices. It still plays well however, once you get used to its quick and how different it is from a standard platformer with four directional buttons or on-screen icons.

If you are looking for an additional platformer to add to your collection or a game you can play with one hand while standing in line, Almost There will fit that role nicely.

Watch Dungeon X Dungeon with Carter from TouchArcade on www.twitch.tv

You play as Luke, a treasure hunter thrown into the dungeon by an evil pope. There’s something about an ancient evil in the dungeon that will be awoken, so you have to escape and also possibly deal with that stuff. Meanwhile, a couple of allies come and go, and will either help you on your way, or get stuck and then you have to help them. They “why" of this is all so confused because Dungeon X Dungeon has a terrible English language translation. While this sometimes leads to comical moments where the tone is perhaps rougher than intended, as the protagonist just delivers absolutely stunning burns to his allies for their faults.

The problem is that the bad translation makes the story incoherent and leads to issues with some items. I couldn’t tell you what they do, and why you should equip them. Even the moon system is described in confusing text to where you can’t understand it right away. It makes the enemies stronger on the full moon, but also increases your critical attack chances. Why does it exist beyond the developer thinking it was good to include? I don’t know!

Dungeon X Dungeon gives you some acrobatic abilities to play with over time, as you get a double jump, but also a clunky wall jump. You can only use the wall jump if you’ve jumped once, and you have a split-second to jump off of the wall to the other side, and you have to purposely hold in the direction you’re clinging to ensure the game recognizes that you’re holding onto the wall.

You’ll want to use the individual directional buttons, and not just the virtual joystick, in particular when you get an ability that charges by holding the down direction. MFi controls are sadly lacking, too. The virtual buttons work pretty well, though, and you can rearrange and resize all of the controls. The buttons are kind of huge on the iPad by default, but I had few issues with mis-hitting any button despite having four different actions.

The boss fights are certainly questionably-designed. You can defeat the first boss by sitting back and firing arrows until he is dead. another boss can be easily whipped to death. Some worlds just skip the boss altogether. Good call! The game’s difficulty as a whole is uneven by design due to the moon system in play, as enemies will occasionally do massive amounts of damage, and other times, their hits will bounce off of you like nothing. I don’t understand why the moon system exists in the first place. Perhaps this is explained in the story, but between the rough translation and the propensity for text to skip too far forward, I’m sure there’s some reason. Not that it really matters, it just means to be careful when the moon is full.

The system where you can only equip one particular item at a time probably shouldn’t exist, because there’s no real point to it. I didn’t notice any items canceling each other out, and some items stay permanently equipped! Is there any reason I can’t have a fire extinguisher and the ability to go through electric fields enabled simultaneously? I think not! It’s just a slightly annoying thing, but it was certainly a questionable decision.

The thing is, despite the many flaws of the game, it’s still a pretty enjoyable time. Perhaps this is just because of the strength of the Metroidvania genre itself, where finding new upgrades and retracing your steps to overcome previously-inaccessible sections is just a fun thing to do. The game’s stance on backtracking is kind of iffy, as some areas get closed off but others let you properly backtrack. So, make sure that you get all of the red chests (and blue chests, containing crystals for upgrading items) before you move on, because you might not get a chance again. Many of them contain optional upgrades, like new weapons, or armor, but new items often are more efficient in their upgrades. For example, the axe you get gains more damage with each upgrade than your starting sword, and then the whip you find later on gets more power with each upgrade, not to mention that it can do multiple hits in its combo attack, and be utter cheese against bosses.

I think it all goes to show that why Metroidvanias are so popular: even if the implementation is sloppy as it is in Dungeon X Dungeon, the game can still be good. And, I can critique virtually everything here, and if you’re a scholar of game design you likely will find more nits to pick. But if you just go with the flow, you’ll likely have fun, especially since a great mobile Metroidvania doesn’t come along all that often. The pixel art in the game is great, with a colorful theme that is never dull, and low-resolution pixels that are chunky but detailed. It’s the strongest aspect of the game, and it shows that the developer really put a lot of time and care into this portion of the experience.

I definitely hand down a mixed recommendation for Dungeon X Dungeon. It’s got a lot of flaws, but I don’t think any of them are deal breakers. it’s like driving a car that has a bunch of small problems with it but gets you where you need to go with good gas mileage. If this game intrigues you, please don’t let all the small issues get in the way, as you’ll likely have a good time regardless!

The iOS version follows the pattern of other SEGA Forever releases. The emulation is decent enough, with a few inaccuracies that shouldn’t be a big deal for most players. You can use an MFi controller if you have one, or you can try to make do with customizable virtual controls. You can download and play the game free if you don’t mind ads popping up now and then, or you can pay for an IAP that removes all non-SEGA ads. Extra options include save states (very handy for this game), a few filter choices, and a special rewind feature that allows you to take back the last fifteen seconds of gameplay if you make a mistake.

If Gunstar Heroes was a little tricky with virtual buttons, Dynamite Headdy is a nightmare. It’s not the poorest fit in the SEGA Forever line-up (Revenge of Shinobi is nigh-impossible), but if you’re not a legitimate ace with touch controls, you’re not going to get very far. Headdy can shoot his head in eight directions, and regularly needs to jump and shoot at the same time. Both of these scenarios would have some issues with some of the best virtual controls, and these aren’t the best by any means. Any part of the game that requires you to quickly launch Headdy’s head in different directions rapidly becomes an exercise in irritation.

Even with an MFi controller, you’re going to find this one to be quite the challenge. Dynamite Headdy was one of those games that had its difficulty adjusted upwards for its Western release, making it a bit of a tough nut to crack. It’s nothing insurmountable, but this game rightfully earned its reputation among Western gamers back in the day. If you’re stuck with the virtual controls, you can definitely still have some fun with this game. But you’ll certainly want to give it a try before you plunk any money down, if only to make sure that you’re getting into fun rather than frustration. It shouldn’t take you more than a couple of stages to suss out whether you can deal with the game’s challenges or not.

Dynamite Headdy was released in 1994 and was Treasure’s third game, following up on Gunstar Heroes and McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure. It’s a rather inventive side-scrolling platformer with some amazing set pieces and impressive bosses, as you would expect from this developer. It uses effects rarely seen on SEGA’s 16-bit hardware, but its clever nature isn’t simply limited to its visuals. Just about every level has you doing something new, making for quite the roller coaster ride through its nine worlds. Treasure didn’t hit a home run every time it stepped up to the plate, but even its worst platformers tended to be well-stocked with interesting concepts. Dynamite Headdy sits somewhere in the middle of the developer’s catalogue, which isn’t a bad place to be at all.

The hero, Headdy, is a puppet who can jump and toss his head. Yes, this is the second Genesis release in the SEGA Forever line-up that involves throwing your head at enemies. This one is the better one, to be honest. Headdy can throw his head in eight directions, using it to attack foes, activate various machines, and climb up onto ledges. Occasionally, you’ll come across a power-up that will swap out Headdy’s head for another one, granting you temporary access to some interesting powers. Some of these are integral to solving light puzzles within the stages, while others are just there for a little extra fire power. There are seventeen in total, and almost all of them are beneficial in one way or another.

Unfortunately, the overseas version of the game was made a lot more difficult than the original Japanese version. This manifests in the form of things as trifling as adding a few extra enemies on screen, to more serious alterations like adding extra projectiles to boss attacks and doubling their life bars. Dynamite Headdy wasn’t a particularly easy game in its original form, and in my opinion, all of these changes are without question worse for the overall experience. It changed the game from a relatively accessible albeit challenging action-platformer to something that demands serious skills. While I’ve mentioned before that I wish SEGA would include the option to play the various regions’ version of each game, I really wish we had it here. Mobile gamers have enough challenge ahead of them thanks to the virtual controls, so having the Japanese version’s relatively easier arrangement would really help make it less frustrating.

If you’re patient, Dynamite Headdy pays off in spades. Every world is an amazing ride through wild backdrops and locations that come alive thanks to elaborate animations and props. The absurd amount of power-ups are used to great effect, often presenting the player with alternate routes through levels if the player has the right head at the moment. The bosses are naturally outstanding. Many of them are huge multi-part constructs that you have to disassemble piece by piece. The excellent visuals are backed by a great soundtrack that uses the Genesis sound synthesizer to its fullest extent. This game was released relatively late in the system’s life span, and it truly shows.

While Dynamite Headdy is a great game in its original form, those playing the SEGA Forever version will have to contend with a couple of obstacles to get to that enjoyment. The combination of the Western version’s spiked difficulty and the inherent issues with virtual button controls slapped onto a game that was never designed for them creates a barrier that many players are going to bounce off of. If you’re playing with an MFi controller, you’ll find Headdy to be a tough challenge that is more than worth standing up to. Otherwise, the game might turn out to be more annoying than entertaining.

This is a turn-based puzzler where you move one between connected nodes on the grid-like levels, using stealth to avoid detection from the police. You move, and then the police make their move, but if you walk into their line of sight, or into a fail state position where you are one tile from them, this will happen even before the police make their move, even if their behavior indicates they will turn a certain direction, for example. Your goal in each level is to make it to the designated graffiti spot, spray paint your message of truth (or a giant cartoon dong), and then bust it to the exit, without getting nabbed by the coppers.

Where Vandals differs from the other Go games is that sound generation plays a big role in deterring your pursuers. You can whistle to draw nearby guards, though you better have a plan to book it out of there before they see you and try to capture you. The guards aren’t very smart for most of the game, thankfully, so you can just get out of their line of sight…usually. You’ll also pick up bottles that you can throw further than you can whistle, so you can create diversions. You are the loudest street artist in the history of the medium, so you will wind up drawing attention to anybody near you when you spray your latest masterpiece. So, ideally you’ll want to send your enemies far away, and then spray in peace.

A lot of the fun actually comes from making your own graffiti. You’re given a fresh canvas on each level, and while you can just use the name you put in (with a variety of different fonts) you can also draw your own graffiti. There isn’t a time limit, or any bonus to drawing custom graffiti, it’s just a neat thing that you can do. And hey, it’s a nice bit of fun.

The game offers three stars for doing well on a level: completing without being seen, getting the bonus star, and completing in under a certain number of moves. You can complete levels without any stars, though getting stars mostly just unlocks other levels, including side quest levels you can play through. While it might not make it possible to win a level with the Invisible or Turns conditions, you can do some fun things like getting cops to chase you around corners, freeing up the exit in the level for you. The cops have predictable behavior, and while the game can throw some stumpers at you, I never felt excessively challenged.

Also, the game does more than just use graffiti and street art as a convenient theme. There are photographs you can tap in some levels that will show you information on street art history, and educate you about some famous street artists throughout history. The game itself takes place in different periods of history in famous world cities, and artists from those scenes are featured in these little info cards.

Vandals supports portrait and landscape orientations, which is something more games absolutely need to do going forward. Especially for a turn-base game like this, where it feels like there’s no reason for it not to support portrait mode if at all possible. Vandals can be played one-handed on a bus or train, or just sitting back, relaxing. It’s a convenience factor that many games, especially puzzle titles, tend to overlook.

The chief problem with Vandals is that it’s extremely derivative of the Go games. There’s something rather particular about the rules, the structure, even the interconnected dots, that makes the game just feel like an unauthorized entry in the Go series. This is fine! It’s a good game series to steal from! Of course, it seems like Square Enix Montreal isn’t making any more Go games, so if you want more of this kind of gameplay, something like Vandals is what you’ll have to enjoy. And honestly, I find Vandals to a bit more enjoyable than Deus Ex Go was, particularly since Vandals has a sense of style and character that Deus Ex lacked.

The problem is that I didn’t really enjoy Deus Ex Go because it didn’t bring a whole lot that was new to the table. While I’ll certainly enjoy something like dual-stick shooters in all their variations, this turn-based puzzle gameplay is built around so many specific rules that future games built around those rules will start to feel similar. Each of the Go games added its own twists, but it feels like the concept has had diminishing returns with further entries. And Vandals, as a game that cribs from that series, winds up being an original title that still feels a bit tired. Like, I’ve been here before, I’ve seen how this all works. Sure, there’s a couple new gameplay elements, but that’s not exactly anything surprising. Live by the homage, die by the homage.

The counterpoint is that if you haven’t played the Go games or enjoyed Deus Ex Go, you’ll likely have a good time with this one. Such is the nature of these kinds of games that hew closely to their source material. And it’s certainly a credit to Vandals that it feels just like the “real" thing while also honestly having its own catches. I just can’t get over the fact that I feel like I’ve played this before. It’s not bad, just that maybe the concept needs to wait a few years before it feels fresh again.

The aesthetic is one that deliberately takes from the low-polygon era of PS1 graphics, with the top-down view of Metal Gear Solid. In fact, if you couldn’t tell from the everything about the game, it’s a massive parody of Metal Gear Solid. Everything is ridiculous and meant to evoke that era. The game nails its inspirations stylistically. The iOS version also looks just like it did on the Switch. It makes my iPad Air 2 run super-hot, though (not to be confused with making my iPad Air 2 run SUPERHOT) so don’t expect great battery life from lower-spec devices.

The gameplay of Never Stop Sneakin’ involves sneaking through procedurally-generated levels, executing stealth kills on enemies. You have to stay out of the line of sight of guards, but if they see you, you automatically use a bullet (if you have any) to kill them, and keep your combo going. Other items like smoke grenades and EMPs will help in different circumstances, but all are done so automatically. The entire game is just about moving your character, walking up to enemies to attack them, and letting the game handle any actions. It makes the game playable with one hand, though there is landscape orientation support, and you can use an MFi controller. The touchscreen works well for movement, so you don’t have to use a controller.

By simplifying down all of the actions, Never Stop Sneakin’ becomes about resource management as well as smart planning. You have a combo meter to keep going, as it awards you more points, and more opportunities to get the game’s currency, used both mid-level to buy items and to unlock further parts of the game’s progression system. So at times, you might want to act intelligently and get all stealth kills. But then you might need to make a decision to just walk into the light and let your items take care of your foes for you really quickly.

What really disrupts the flow of the game is the computer hacking. You have to stand in front of a terminal for a few seconds to hack a terminal for more intel, or to find chests with items. These cause your combo meter to drop, so you have to time your hacks well. Also, your combo meter drops faster the more you wait, so you can easily lose a combo if you get into an empty section, or decide to eschew some items. It just doesn’t feel satisfying at all.

The problem with the game’s structure is that it’s very repetitive, because the game’s progression is not about completing levels, but earning currency, and completing certain objectives to advance the meta-game. And it’s that which takes away some of what makes the game special. Bosses like Vice President Helicopter are amazing…the first few times. But when they become a recurring foe you might randomly face at the end of combat, it’s a bit less meaningful. Procedurally-generated levels tend to lack a certain character to them, especially when you see the same chunks of levels again and again. And it also means that scenes like being on an airship lose any kind of emotional resonance, they’re just a randomly-chosen theme. Perhaps this is the point, but it feels like a decision that backfired.

Also, the game just does not work for long play sessions. The game feels too same-y, especially as many of its tricks are revealed. Even a single play session becomes a bit grating as you have to complete several sets of levels in a row. The variety’s just kind of lacking, especially because the number of tools you get to handle situations are so limited. You can unlock new characters over time, but their differences are all cosmetic.

It’s not all so bad, as Never Stop Sneakin’s concept is still pretty clever, and the story manages to both pay homage to Metal Gear Solid while also mocking it in a loving way. And I was always amused to find out what tricks Amadeus Guildenstern had up his sleeve. I’m glad I played this, even though it’s very easy to hit a point where you just kind of stop playing.

Never Stop Sneakin’ is best enjoyed maybe once or twice a day. Play it, complete an objective, set it down, move on with your life. Beat it over the next few weeks or months. Let its surprises keep surprising you. But if you’re looking for a brilliant Metal Gear Solid parody that you can sink a few hours into, you’ll find the game numbingly repetitive. Want a game with a goofy premise you can pick up and progress in steadily? Never Stop Sneakin’ has way more character than the average daily “pick up and play" mobile game, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately, the other effect of that heavy competition is that it has become extremely hard for a new game to succeed, especially if it can’t lean on an established brand. And it’s in that zone where Gamevil has been living for the last little while, launching several social RPGs that have obviously had a lot of resources poured into them to somewhat limited success worldwide. Heir of Light (Free) is the latest, and it’s one of the publisher’s most extravagant releases yet. This game looks absolutely gorgeous, is packed full of content that is accessible even to free players, and has a rather substantial story. It’s not exactly brimming with new ideas, but it’s well-made enough.

And yet, I can’t help but feel a strong sense of ennui as I play it. Apart from the razzle-dazzle of its visuals, Heir of Light doesn’t have much to offer anyone who has grown weary of this particular brand of hamster wheel. The story is original enough, but it’s wordy and overly-complicated in that way that makes your eyes glaze over and your finger start compulsively tapping to skip the text. There are a lot of systems in place for building up your team, but as is often the case with recent social RPGs, it’s almost too much. Summon characters from a gacha-style random draw, level them up by fighting, sink points into a bunch of stats, collect runes, equip the runes, gather materials, evolve the characters, and don’t ignore too much of this or you’ll hit a wall hard.

The stuffing in between the collecting, evolving, and upgrading in this game takes the form of some nice-looking real-time 3D battles. You can take manual control in these battles, tapping your skill of choice when it’s ready to go, setting up team attacks, using buffs at appropriate times, and so on. Most of the time you can just turn on the auto-battle and let your team do their thing, however. They’ll usually do just as well as you would, though you’ll want to get your hands on the wheel in some of the tougher fights. Your team consists of up to four characters. Using their skills involves waiting for a sort of party-wide cooldown, making sure the skill you want to use is ready and not suffering from its individual cooldown, then tapping the appropriate icon. You can queue up multiple skills, so you don’t have to worry too much about the state of your reflexes.

As you play through the single-player campaign and level up, you’ll unlock the usual extra modes you see in games like these, including player-versus-player battles. There is plenty to do in Heir of Light even at launch, and it’s likely that Gamevil will only add to it as time goes on. Of course, all the usual rules apply here. You need to be online for the game to perform regular check-ins. You can summon lower-quality characters without spending any real money, but the best ones can only be found in a draw that requires using premium currency. That currency is handed out now and then for free, but if you’re hunting a particular character you’ll probably need to open your wallet. Stamina meter? Yes, naturally. Not too bad in the beginning, gets to be a bit of a hassle in the long run. You know how this song goes.

In a vacuum, you could probably really get into all of this. Sure, you’re never going to hit any actual final ending, which means any work the story puts in is never going to pay off in any way. And like most social RPGs there are some things that will be extremely difficult to pull off if you’re not a paying customer. None of that is odd, however, and Heir of Light is in most respects a fine example of the genre. But given the required time, money, and energy investment from the player that a social RPG demands, I’m not sure that just being a fine example is good enough. I’ve been on this treadmill before, and if I’m to keep running on one, I’m not sure that Heir of Light would be my top choice. It’s the definition of solid but not spectacular.

Except the graphics, anyway. Goodness gracious, what a pretty game this is. The art design is good, and both the 3D models and the effects applied to them are quite impressive. One of those games where you plug into the wall while you play and your battery meter slinks downward anyway. A veritable hand-warmer for cold nights. Social RPGs are quickly becoming the genre that pushes mobile hardware more than any other, and Heir of Light comfortably sits at the cutting edge of that category. It starts recycling a lot of its visual content after a while, but I can hardly blame the publisher for wanting to get some extra bang for their buck. Is it worth checking the game out just to feast on some eye candy? Well, it is free to try, after all.

The tricky bit is whether or not you’ll want to stick around after that initial romp. I mean, you probably could. It’s an agreeable enough game and there’s a good chunk of content to burn through if you’re that-way inclined. But if you’ve burnt out on or bounced off of a social RPG in the past, you’re likely going to look at Heir of Light the way you’d look at your seventh straight plate of spaghetti and meatballs. It’s not bad spaghetti, but it’s still just spaghetti. Yes, even with that bit of parsley decoratively garnishing the plate. If you’ve still got room in your stomach for more spaghetti, though, this won’t make you sick.

This one comes to us by way of EXE-Create, seemingly the only developer left from Kemco’s hay days that still has any desire to create games like these. The plot is trope-heavy, both in terms of general JRPG tropes and EXE-Create’s usual efforts. In ancient times, two dragons battled each other in a terrible conflict that nearly tore the world apart. The two were sealed by a now-legendary hero, and the world went on in peace. Recent events have unsealed the dragons, however, and it’s up the descendants of that legendary hero to either break the world or save it. You’ll be playing the latter role, of course. As it turns out, one of the dragons was hiding in the humble hamlet the main character was defending, and when the other dragon comes knocking she is forced to reveal herself.

For one of the most powerful beings in existence, she doesn’t seem that bad. More mischievous than anything. She talks a big show about her frightful powers and god-like status, but she can’t really back it up for most of the game. In order for the dragons to gain their full power, they need to gather up special gems called Dragon Lapis that are sealed in goddess statues around the world. Due to the nature of the seal, the dragons can’t use their powers unless they are near a descendant of the legendary hero, which explains how you get dragged along on this business. You’re joined by a down-on-his-luck mercenary and a young witch who has trouble asserting herself. We’ve seen all of these types of characters in EXE-Create’s RPGs before, and they speak with similar voices to those party members of the past.

The gameplay is the typical stuff in broad strokes. You travel from town to town solving problems that generally involve marching out to a dungeon and killing some sort of big boss. Beating monsters gets you experience points and money, both of which can be used to make your characters stronger. The former increases your level, improving your stats and giving you some valuable EP to spend on your job skills. The latter can be spent in towns to buy items and new gear. I probably don’t need to explain all of this, but if Kemco is allowed to repeat as much as they do, I can surely get away with it as well. The battle system is the usual turn-based affair that EXE-Create uses in most of their games, right down to the speed-based turn order meter hanging out at the top of the screen.

Character growth works a little differently in this one compared to some of the developer’s other games. Many of your stat gains will come through special items called Growth Plates. These are small multi-node plates that are often connected with a particular job or weapon. Each node will unlock a stat gain, new ability, or rank-up in a job. When you finish the plate, you’ll get an extra bonus for completion. Many of these abilities are fixed to certain jobs, but once you’ve unlocked a job you can switch to it freely whenever you’d like. There are a few jobs that are exclusive to particular characters, but for the most part you’re free to make the hero a priest and the witch a warrior if that’s your druthers. Besides affecting your stats and which learned abilities you have access to, your job also determines what equipment you can use.

The Growth Plates can be found in chests or among drops from enemies. They’re relatively easy to come across, particularly the ones that grow the basic classes. The EP to unlock the nodes, on the other hand, is a bit more limited. You’ll get some when you level up, complete combat challenges the game randomly throws at you, or by using a fairly uncommon item. You can buy those items using premium points that are slowly earned through combat or bought with real money through the game’s IAP shop. If you don’t resort to buying those items, you’re almost certainly going to have tons of plates you can’t make use of. It’s not a problem for general progress, but if you’re the sort that gets bothered by having resources you can’t use, you’re probably going to be really irritated with it.

The IAP shop also sells the usual assortment of cheat items, and EXE-Create has also included their usual lottery system that gives you a chance to get some cool weapons, items, and accessories using free tickets or premium points. The EP items are included in the free lottery, and those tickets will sporadically drop from enemies, so there is at least a path to earning EP indefinitely so long as you are very patient. The shop also sells keys that are required to open certain treasure room doors. I didn’t find any other way to get those keys in the game, but the treasure doesn’t include anything terribly important and the keys are cheap enough to buy now and then with your earned premium points. Again, it’s annoying but doesn’t really affect your progress through the main story.

In terms of presentation, Dragon Lapis follows the faux-retro style that EXE-Create introduced in Dragon Sinker, and even re-uses some of the enemy sprites from that game. With the novelty gone and the way the style breaks from the period it appears to be emulating in many ways, it ends up feeling like EXE-Create just didn’t want to bother with high-res sprites and character portraits. It certainly doesn’t feel like an 8-bit or 16-bit game in most respects. Still, I suppose it does the job well enough even if it isn’t particularly exceptional or remarkable. One nice touch is that as you advance your job classes, your character’s appearance changes in battle. That’s a little extra bit of effort that we don’t always see put into games with job systems. It’s no Final Fantasy 5, but it’s still appreciated.

I also welcome the portrait orientation for whatever reason it was used. There aren’t enough JRPGs on iOS that let you play this way, so I’m always happy to see one that does. The various options for virtual buttons don’t quite hit the spot the way the Dragon Quest games from Square Enix do, but the options are at least there. Speaking of options, you can also buy this game in a premium or free form. The premium version takes out the in-game ads that you’ll see in the free version and gives you a chunk of premium points to start with. In all other respects, the two apps are identical. If you can put up with the ads and don’t care about the cheat items, you can play Dragon Lapis start to finish without paying a dime.

Ultimately, this is a dance we’ve seen many times from Kemco and EXE-Create. You probably know what to expect from this pairing by now if you’ve been paying attention to the iOS JRPG scene at all, and perhaps don’t really even need a review to know if you want to play the game or not. That being said, there aren’t a lot of traditional single-player JRPGs being released on the App Store anymore, and while this one had the misfortune to drop on the same day as Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition, that doesn’t necessarily mean that hungry mobile JRPG fans should ignore it. Dragon Lapis is a solid enough game that probably won’t stick in your brain for very long but will at least keep you entertained for 20 hours or so.

In Four Last Things, you are a nameless wanderer in jolly old renaissance Europe. You are desparately seeking penance for sins you committed in a neighboring parish but to your dismay you find bishops barring your entry to the local church on the grounds that you have not committed those sins within their parish’s borders. So of course their obvious solution to the problem is that in order to be forgiven by their church, you will have to re-sin within their borders. You are sent off with a check list and the directive to go do something worthy of seeking forgiveness for.

If the artwork and plot aren’t an immediate give away, Four Last Things is a renaissance parody in the same ilk as those old Monty Python Terry Gilliam bits. The tone and tenor of the humor, however, is a little less british and a bit more modern. I say that with a tinge of sadness because for all its irreverence, Monty Python carries with it a certain nobility of idiocy and buffoonery. Unfortunately that nobility is not really carried over in full to Four Last Things. The jokes run a little too modern and a little too fourth wall breaking to hold the same air that I normally equate with this artistic style.

If sacrilege or immodesty are hot button topics for you, then you may need to steer clear of this game. In case you are unaware of those old Monty Python sketches or if you just happen to have too much nostalgia to correctly remember, it would be worth a few minutes of your time to look up a few on youtube just to see what I am referring to. In a lot of ways actually Four Last Things is quite a bit more tame than the Python boys in many instances. For example, in game the immmodesty comes in at the level of renaissance nude portraits and the sacrilege is mostly just a few pokes at how the church used to handle the forgiving of sins. Even with that in consideration you may want to be careful about where you play and who you have play this game.

Once you start off on your quest to complete your checklist of sins, what you will find is a point and click type of adventure game simliar to Grim Fandango ($4.99) or Monkey Island($2.99). Four Last Things isn’t out to stump you with complex or arcane puzzles. You can think of it more along the lines of a medieval Rube Goldberg device. In order to gain access to the church you wil have to wind your way through a series of chained interactions that are for the most part simple logical steps. Being aware of every item on screen that can be interacted with is usually the best way to get through any individual part of the game. The nice part about that is there is a button inside the inventory screen that will highlight anything currently on screen that can be interaced with. In practice, this functions as a nice hint button that does not give away the whole mystery of the game and just makes sure that you are not missing anything.

The score for the game is drawn from public domain material and feels very much at home. Each room, courtyard and street you venture down has its own song and interactible musician. One thing I wish the game had is a little more interactivity with the audio components. In almost every scene, you have a musician or group of musicians that have basically a description of the song being played, an option to sing along and an option to clap for the performance. There is very little deviation from this pattern and it robs the musicians from possibly playing a larger role in the story or being more than a wall decoration that gets passed over for other people you need to interact with.

Four Last Things is a great example for folks that have a heart for game development but not neccessarily the most cutting edge coding chops. In his blog, Joe Richardson shares some of the inner workings of a one man shop and talks about the tools he uses to overcome some of the technical difficulties he encounters. I found it a pretty cool follow up to actually playing the game since it does have a few spoiler-y tidbits inside. What is really cool about this is that normally going cross-platform like Joe here is doing usually involves a lot of custom coding and technical effort that can be very daunting. Any time we can see an instance where tools can be used to overcome tech barriers like this is an amazing thing.

Overall the game completes very quickly but you get to see some great art and goofy slapstick hijinks along the way. It does seem like there are multiple endings and even though I have not yet explored them, there may be some replay value in this game after completing the first time. The app store is getting to the point where you can say something like, “I want to be inside a Terry Gilliam cartoon" and expect it to happen which is utterly amazing. Four Last Things has managed to find a really fun and goofy foothold where very few games can compare.

While I appreciated the story’s social implications (I won’t spoil anything) and feel that it’s important for games to broach such topics, I felt that the game itself didn’t manage to draw me in enough to make me care about Laura because by the time I was able to visualize this person’s life and plight, the game was over.

The premise of Another Lost Phone is that you, the player, find an abandoned phone, and you try to figure out who its owner is and why they abandoned it by exploring its content. As you would expect, the phone contains text messages, photos, emails, contacts, and pretty much everything else you would expect to find on the phones of most people you know. Part of the phone’s content isn’t accessible to you straight away, and you have to solve various puzzles to discover passwords and other clues that will allow you to fully explore the phone and solve the mystery about its owner, Laura.

While the phone includes the kind of content you would expect, it also unfortunately come with a burdensome UI that makes navigating the phone confusing and, very often, counter-intuitive. The way you move through the different apps can be frustrating, and it hindered my efforts to grab clues from one app and use it in another. I had to do a lot of searching and memorizing, and that interfered with my efforts to focus on the unfolding narrative and, as a consequence, to empathize with Laura and her plight.

And the puzzles rely mostly on legwork over intuition, as I found myself often going from the email app to the calendar app to the SMS app, following digital breadcrumbs that weren’t challenging to follow but were also not the most interesting and, most of the times, not that relevant for Laura’s current situation. I wasn’t really challenged by Another Lost Phone (which is perfectly fine in a game like this one), but I did have to go back and forth between apps a lot, and when you add the tricky UI to the mix, you can understand why I had a hard time focusing on the narrative.

The game’s strength is, of course, its narrative and its attempt to give players a window into the social repercussions of an untamed digital world that can easily become a tool to be used against many. Again, it’s tricky to talk about the narrative without giving away the whole story behind Laura’s phone, but let’s just say it’s a story you’ve definitely heard before if you’ve been reading any news over the last couple of years. And that sad part is that you’ve probably heard it repeatedly. I saw the story’s “twist" coming quite early in the game, but that’s not the game’s weakness; it’s rather a testament to how events like the one in Another Lost Phone have unfortunately become common.

Another Lost Phone does do a good job using emails and texts to show some of the realities of the connected world many of us aren’t usually aware of, and while the story didn’t stick with me as much as it could have, it did remind me of events and realities happening all around me daily and how I’ve been lucky enough not to have similar personal experiences. Not many games take on these kinds of stories, especially with the way the internet can react to such attempts, so Another Lost Phone is definitely important in that respect and worth playing for that reason alone.

I do believe, though, that Another Lost Phone could have been even more impactful if it had a less obtrusive phone UI—so I could focus more on following the narrative—and if its puzzles were less about jumping from app to app and more about having to engage with Laura’s story more in-depth. I don’t know how that version of the game would look, but I do think it would have made me think about Laura and her story even more. And the game’s brevity also worked against making me delve deeper into Laura’s life and character.

Still, Another Lost Phone is worth playing because it does broach the kinds of topics we don’t usually see in mobile games but we see and hear about every day. Some may disagree about the potential of mobile games as a tool for social awareness, but since these devices are usually implicated in all kinds of unpleasantness, I think it’s appropriate that they also be used as a way to remedy the issues they can often create.

Golden Axe is back on the App Store courtesy of the SEGA Forever initiative. This is the Genesis/Mega Drive version that was already released in 2009 but pulled after it had a whammy put on it by too many iOS updates. Naturally, it’s using the new SEGA Forever emulator and feature set, so it’s not perfect, but it’s definitely close enough for most people at this point. You can play for free if you don’t mind ads interrupting you and having to be online to play, or you can splurge for the IAP to remove the ads and the ability to play offline. Whether you pay or not, you can take advantage of MFi controller support if that is your particular jam. Double-tapping can be a little tricky on the virtual pad, but otherwise Golden Axe doesn’t suffer too much if you’re playing it with touch controls. The loss of the two-player mode is a far bigger blow.

Anyway, if you’re just here to ride the Nostalgia Choo-Choo, all aboard. I mean, provided your warm fuzzy memories of this one don’t involve your friend or sibling by your side playing with you. This is the console version of Golden Axe, in all of its Conan-meets-Double Dragon glory. Aside from the fact that you can’t choose the two-player mode, everything is here intact, right down to the stage select code. All of the latest options that we saw in Ristar are here too, so you can choose to use a graphical filter, move around the controls, and so on. Save states are also in and highly welcome given the game’s nasty level of difficulty. It’s a pretty great experience all-around for those seeking to revisit the good old days without leaving the comfort of their bed, office chair, or toilet.

As to the question of whether or not Golden Axe is worth more than a nostalgia trip, that’s tougher. Belt-scrolling beat-em-ups had a real boom from Double Dragon‘s 1987 debut until the 1992 arrival of Street Fighter 2, a game that supercharged a new genre, dethroned the previous king, and changed the whole arcade landscape. In that brief half-decade, just about every company tried their hand at a beat-em-up to varying degrees of success, and the genre evolved at a rapid rate as a result. Golden Axe falls right in the middle of that period, and it feels like it. When compared to its contemporaries, it comes out looking quite good. Multiple playable characters with different fighting styles and parameters, super moves, a relatively large count of stages, an interesting theme, and rideable mounts all put this at or beyond the best of what was available in 1989. It’s fast, the visuals are appealing, and the soundtrack perfectly captures the feeling of Arnie in a loincloth punching a camel.

The Genesis version of the game improves on the arcade version in a number of ways. It has a new Duel mode that challenges you to survive in consecutive battles against a variety of enemies. You can’t play the two-player version of this mode on the mobile version, but it’s still a little fun to see how far you can go. There’s also a Beginner mode that makes the game easier at the expense of ending halfway through. The meat is in the Arcade mode, however, which recreates the original arcade game with an added stage and ultimate final boss. In exchange, you lose some of the graphical quality of the arcade version, along with its amazingly bizarre ending. There’s also some light censorship in the home version, but nothing to get too up in arms about. Oh, and you can’t credit-feed your way to the ending in the home version. Four continues are all you get. If I were SEGA, I probably would have chosen the Genesis version for this release as well.

Unfortunately, while Golden Axe is an exceptional beat-em-up by 1989 standards, the genre had a whole lot more track in front of it. SEGA themselves would surpass Golden Axe several times over, both in its arcade-exclusive sequel Revenge of Death Adder and in other series such as Streets of Rage. With its origins firmly planted in the arcades, the game is constantly hopping over the line between tough and cheap. The added boss in the Genesis version vaults over that line with a grin and a thumbs-up, mocking you the whole way. It’s even worse here since you can’t count on a friend helping you out. The list of moves for each character is fairly small, and there are some instances of platforming that have no place in a beat-em-up with such floaty jumping controls. Boss and enemy variety is a little on the thin side, and there are frankly few foes for which a dashing attack isn’t the best medicine.

Having said all that, I must concede that Golden Axe is still quite playable today, even if it is enormously frustrating at times. Time has done it few favors, but the core is solid enough that I think even a new player could enjoy it unless they have a particular aversion to this sort of thing. I think it would be a lot easier to have fun with the game if SEGA had worked out some sort of solution to allow the two-player mode to function, but even a solo player can get some kicks out of bashing in a skeleton’s head with the pommel of their broadsword before chucking it at its fellow henchmen. No matter how much time passes, I can’t bring myself to dislike a game that dedicates itself so diligently to making an interactive Frank Frazetta painting.

You can try Golden Axe for free to see if it’s up your alley, but I suspect the majority of the people reading this already know. In which case, the most helpful information that I can offer to you is that it is indeed the Genesis version, SEGA did a decent job of emulating it, there’s no way to play two-players, and it doesn’t lose much from the switch to touch controls. If you already bought this game in its previous iOS incarnation, you can restore your purchase to get the ad-free version at no additional cost. The axe is waiting, a little chipped but still sharp enough to separate a head from its shoulders. Whether or not you pick it up is up to you.

The star of the show is Hadjane, the queen of the underworld and ruler of all the demons, goblins, and other ne’er-do-wells found there. Or at least, she was. Unfortunately, her lazy and cruel nature has sown the seeds of a rebellion. Almost all of her minions have left her, with only a maid and her faithful assistant rat remaining by her side. At the prodding of the aforementioned maid, Hadjane decides to show her mutinous former underlings who the boss really is. It’s a cute set-up for the game, and Hadjane’s typical self-centered queen personality can be a lot of fun to follow. The plot eventually goes somewhere, but you probably won’t be surprised by any of it. Still, it’s a decent enough side dish, and it’s localized well enough to entertain.

The main course comes in the form of brief action stages that see Hadjane take to the field with her signature scythe to wreak some havoc. She’s pretty powerful, but even with all of her might behind her, she’ll get overwhelmed on her own. Fortunately, she can summon minions to help her out. When you down an enemy, they have a good chance of leaving a soul piece behind. Tap the summon button and you’ll draw out a minion who will stick with you until you do a screen transition or the creature dies. You can have multiple minions out at once. The basic strategy involves using them as bait to draw the attention of enemy monsters away, then slicing the beasties in the back and using their souls to replace any of your fallen troops. Hadjane also has a super attack she can use every so often, but it’s best saved for the boss of each stage unless you know you’ll have it charged and ready to go again in time.

The set-up doesn’t necessarily rule out complex combat mechanics, but I’m afraid you won’t find anything of the sort here. Hadjane has only the most basic of attacks, and the combat is simple enough that the game even includes an auto-battle mechanic. It’s better to keep it off in tight fights as movement is still an important concern in some cases, but more often than not it’s your stats that will win or lose the day for you. Hadjane and her minions level up by collecting and spending various types of karma. You’ll gather most of it from playing (and replaying) levels, but you can also win it in a simple bonus game that you’re allowed to play now and then. You can also upgrade Hadjane’s weapons and craft new ones using materials you’ll collect from enemies. Finally, there are also special keys that rarely drop that will open up some extra stages in each world.

It’s in this cruft that we are reminded what Hit-Point has been up to of late that caused them to stop making six or seven JRPGs per year. They’ve had a lot of success with free-to-play games like Neko Atsume, and now that they’ve tasted blood they can’t seem to stop snacking on villagers. As these things go, What Hadjane Says Goes! isn’t that bad, but it certainly feels more like a free-to-play game than a paid one. There are daily login bonuses, items that give you a timed boost on materials collected, and a premium currency used for continuing, buying keys, or simply picking up decorations for Hadjane’s room. The aforementioned mini-game uses tickets that you’ll get daily or as part of your rewards for completing achievements, and sure enough, you can buy those tickets with premium currency.

Even if you take full advantage of the generous amount of premium currency the game gives you at the start, you’re going to still run into moments where you essentially have to go back and grind a bit. And that’s assuming you’re pressing every possible benefit available to you for free. If you don’t use the boosts, rarely play the mini-game, or use your resources in the wrong way, you’re going to be doing a lot of grinding to move forward. Thankfully, there’s no trace of a stamina system here, so you can do that grinding if you’re so inclined. I can’t help but wonder if the game’s balance would have been different if it were made a half-decade ago.

It probably could have been, too. This is the same old engine that Hit-Point has been trotting out for quite a while now. It’s not terribly different from how EXE-Create adapted their JRPG engine to accommodate Across Age. It looks okay in stills, if a little bit retro in its charms, but in motion it can often become chaotic. It’s hard to make out your team against the enemies, so you’ll have to rely on cues like the color of their life bars to sort out who’s who. The music is a little more electric guitar-heavy than Hit-Point’s usual, though nowhere near the level of butt-rock seen in some of Kemco’s other published releases.

All that said, I kind of like What Hadjane Says Goes! overall. It’s funny and while the action is mindless, there’s a certain joy to it. The biggest problems the game has is in its difficulty balancing, somewhat skeezy leveling mechanics, and the lack of any depth in the combat. It’s a silly button-masher that requires plenty of grinding and the gathering of seventeen different spices to make a new weapon, but its goofy story and characters keep it from being totally mediocre. Just barely, mind you. If you miss the old days of KRPG-style button-bashers and don’t mind a little resistance from what is clearly a painted-over free-to-play experience, you might enjoy having Hadjane’s boot on your throat for a bit.

You begin Nexomon as a new “Tamer" who has the ability to tame Nexomon. Nexomon are the Pokemon of the Nexomon world. After you choose your character’s gender and name, you set out on an adventure to build a powerful team of Nexomon and save the world. Does this sound familiar? The story was a bit cliche at the beginning of the game but it was surprisingly good throughout its entire duration. The cast of characters you meet within the game each have personalities all of their own and I enjoyed getting to know each of them throughout my journey, especially my quirky robot companion named Atlas.

The aesthetics of the game are incredible. I loved the ridiculously detailed 2D artwork and animations throughout the game. Nexomon have super smooth animations that bring them to life in battles, characters/environments are varied and well-animated, and story sequences are thematic. There is even a gyroscope mechanic that moves the background of the game whenever you tilt your phone during the opening screen and Nexomon battles. I thought this was a clever addition. I have absolutely no complaints in this department. The developers definitely made a lot of effort to give Nexomon a unique look and it shows.

However, how does the gameplay of Nexomon measure up to its high-quality visuals? There are 9 diverse regions for you to explore and 8 legendary Nexomon to defeat. There are also Overseers (Nexomon’s versions of Gym Leaders in Pokemon) and other Tamers for you to battle. The battles themselves take place in a wide variety of locations, such as tall patches of grass, caves, volcanoes, and other unique settings. You still adhere to the same rock-paper-scissors gameplay of Pokemon within Nexomon, where using certain types of Nexomon against other types can maximize their effectiveness. It’s important to mention that you acquire in-game currency for any battle that you win, including battles where you fight wild Nexomon. You can spend this currency to buy items at shops within towns. Towns also contain a hospital for you to heal your Nexomon.

The battle screen of Nexomon is set up similarly to Pokemon but, unfortunately, you cannot read the details of what each move does within the battle screen. You have to wait to learn the details of attacks until you are outside of battle. I found this to be inconvenient at the beginning of my time with the game because I was trying to learn what each move did. Another concern I discovered with the battle system of Nexomon is that moves that inflict status effects are extremely under-powered. It’s hard to land them and they don’t seem very impactful at all when you do, especially when trying to catch Nexomon in the wild.

This brings me to one of the main gripes I have with Nexomon: its catching rates. Nexomon are sorted into different rarities within the game. These rarities are in the order of common, rare, super rare, mega rare, ultra rare, and legendary. You catch Nexomon by using “Nexotraps"…LOTS and LOTS of Nexotraps. I regularly found myself having to use 15 or more Nexotraps to catch any Nexomon with a rarity of super rare or higher, despite lowering its HP significantly and putting it to sleep (as well as other status effects). This was very time-consuming and made me feel dread, instead of excitement, whenever I found a high rarity Nexomon. I feel as though the difficulty of catching rarer Nexomon should come from finding them in the wild and making them vulnerable enough to catch, not the actual act of catching them. It was strange to experience this in a game where one of a player’s main goals is to collect as many different creatures as possible.

However, there are “Gold" Nexotraps available only through IAP that guarantee one capture each. I feel as though the capture rates for regular Nexotraps within the game were made this way in order to encourage players to purchase the aforementioned Gold Nexotraps. It’s still possible to catch every Nexomon you encounter within the game but it takes a lot more time than it should, due to having to grind for in-game currency (to buy numerous Nexotraps) and then throwing handfuls of them (one by one) at a Nexomon hoping to catch it. The developers of the game have said that the rates were lower than they anticipated and that they will put out an update to increase catching rates. Hopefully that happens soon!

Nexotraps aren’t the only in-app-purchase available within Nexomon. You can buy Nexomon companions to follow behind you in-game, new skins for your character, and Regular/Gold Nexoboxes. Regular Nexoboxes give you a chance of receiving any Nexomon within the game. Gold Nexoboxes have a chance of giving you a super rare Nexomon, or above, guaranteed. The notification icon for these Nexoboxes, as well as the notification icon for buying premium currency for IAP’s, are visible on the main screen throughout your time with the game. There is no option to hide them. I found these icons to be quite tacky and in your face. It made me feel like I was playing a free-to-play game instead of a game I already paid for. Some legendary Nexomon are only available within Nexoboxes, which is quite a bummer. The developers say that they will be holding events where you can catch them for free instead. I am definitely crossing my fingers for this to be true. I don’t like leaving things up to RNG.

You can also buy permanent items, such as Nexo Skates, Experience Share, Nexo Charm, and Repel Spray. I played without these items for about half of my playtime and then I experimented with all of them for the rest. I found that the Experience Share helped a ton with leveling my Nexomon faster and reduced most of the grind I was experiencing. However, I enjoyed grinding and leveling Nexomon one-by-one. In my opinion, this is a very fair IAP. The Nexo Skates and Repel Spray both did exactly what they said they would. I was able to travel faster and not run into any wild Nexomon whenever I didn’t want to. However, I felt these were just quality of life items that are totally optional. They did not affect the gameplay significantly enough for me to feel that they were needed. These are definitely fair IAP’s as well. The permanent item that had the biggest effect on my time with the game was the Nexo Charm. This item allows you to run into rarer Nexomon more often. Before I started using this item I had run into VERY few Nexomon that were above super rare in rarity. I feel like having the Nexo Charm made it so I could actually encounter every rarity of Nexomon, instead of once in a blue moon (or not at all). This is a must-have item (in my opinion) and it will cost you a little more money.

I don’t want you to get the impression that all of these things make Nexomon unplayable or not enjoyable. You can beat the entire game after you buy it without any further purchases. I just feel like some of the IAPs hamper the experience a bit and hold it back from being almost flawless. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the game and I experienced the nostalgic feelings I was looking for. It was a blast to acquire my favorite Nexomon and create my dream team. I’ll be observing the game’s progression in the future and I will keep trying to to Tame ’em all, despite me already beating the game after around 10+ hours.

There’s no doubt that Nexomon wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve. It is first, and foremost, a game that tries to emulate the Pokemon formula. The phrase “Pokemon clone" usually has quite a few negative connotations attached to it. However, Nexomon manages to have an amazing art style, quality music, and a large/unique roster of creatures to collect. The only things that hold this game back from being incredible is its horrendous catching rates and the portions of its in-app-purchases that I feel should have automatically been included in the initial $2.99 purchase of the game.

If you are looking for a Pokemon clone for your mobile device, this is as good as it gets. Trust me, I have tried ’em all. Just be ready for an unnecessarily long grind ahead of you if you want to catch… *clears throat* tame ’em all without forking over a bit more money in the process. Don’t forget to check out other people’s impressions of Nexomon in our forums, where the developers have been quite active and receptive to feedback, and leave impressions of your own.

In Mr. Future Ninja, you control three ninjas with different abilities, and can split them off in order to utilize their power to advance through levels. The purple ninja can shoot shurikens to hit enemies and switches from a distance, the teal ninja can dash across gaps (and away from enemies), and the orange ninja can knock out enemies from behind. All the while, you’re trying to avoid detection, as the enemies are very good at taking you out quickly once they find you. The game isn’t too punishing: detection isn’t instant death, and if you have the teal ninja selected, a quick dash can help you get away. Now, you can also split the ninjas off, which becomes necessary for switch-based puzzles. Also, when you have three ninjas grouped together, the final ninja in the line can get hit more easily, and if one ninja dies, the whole trio goes down.

The first third of the game is just you and the purple ninja, utilizing the shuriken for switch-based puzzles and the occasional brief enemy stun or destruction. All the enemies are robots, some of which only are stunned by shuriken, or are even invincible. The teal ninja becomes the star of the show once introduced, as the dash ability is invaluable to certain parts of the game. Purple gets left behind a lot once teal is introduced. Aww. Orange’s stun attack is introduced in the final third of the game, and you have to be kind of behind the enemy to use it, but it’s not too picky. You have puzzles where you have to stun enemies, leave one ninja on a switch, go hit something else, then get your ninja back before the robots wake up. These puzzles are some of the most genius parts of Mr. Future Ninja, as they test your reflexes, and figuring out how to use a trio of characters all together just feels fun, and makes you feel smart for succeeding.

The controls are rather simple: you just have a virtual joystick to move, and then an action button for each character. The game slows down when aiming for the purple and teal ninja, so you don’t have to worry about getting hit while trying to escape a tight situation. You have to pull a ninja from the indicator to split them off, and how this works can be a bit confusing as to which ninja you are still controlling, but never to a terrible degree. Mr. Future Ninja does a good job at keeping its whole concept from ever feeling overwhelming to deal with.

The problem with Mr. Future Ninja is that while the whole multiple-ninja concept is fun to play with, the game is rather shockingly brief. It’s only 19 levels long, and a new main character is introduced and underutilized in the final third of the game. It feels like there’s so much more that could be done with the concept and characters, but instead the whole thing ends on kind of an anticlimax. At least for now, it does: I could see this being a game where there’s the potential for future content updates over time, steadily improving the game. At least, I hope so, because Mr. Future Ninja only reaches a small part of its potential with the three-characters concept. I could see more complicated puzzles with character switching, and more expansive levels, but instead you get the most basic exploration of the mechanics introduced.

I suppose there’s an interesting conflict here. Why do we want longer games? Value for our money? There’s a case that Mr. Future Ninja doesn’t ‘need’ more levels because it introduces and explores it mechanics concisely across 19 levels. And certainly, there are titles all throughout the history of gaming that have decided to stretch out their content by being difficult, or repetitive. Part of the beauty of having a colossal number of games available to the general public right now is that games don’t have to stretch themselves out unnecessarily. Mr. Future Ninja is, at the moment, a brief experience, perhaps on par with what you’d get from a Monument Valley ($3.99) game. But the mechanics of this feel like there’s more that could be done. And the artistic experience isn’t quite on par with Monument Valley, still the champion of beautiful brevity.

And that’s the problem with aiming for beautiful brevity, I suppose, is that if your game doesn’t quite land perfectly, it’s going to feel a bit disappointing. Mr. Future Ninja isn’t ugly, with vibrant colors throughout, but it’s not quite a visual stunner. It looks a lot better on the iPhone than on the iPad, perhaps due to it looking a bit crisper on a smaller, denser display. On iPhone, where it’s stretched out a bit more, the game looks great. There’s iCloud, so you can compare between the platforms easily. But I don’t think Mr. Future Ninja has a superlative style, it’s just a nice-looking game with some interesting atmosphere. The ending is a bit anti-climactic as well, not quite landing with the powerful punch I think it wanted to go for. The last couple of levels would feel great if they were difficult gauntlets, and made you earn that ending, but they’re actually pretty simple. Again, the problem with beautiful brevity: developers have to be really sure their game leaves a powerful impact on players in the short time they have. And Mr. Future Ninja right now feels like it falls short.

But I say ‘right now’, because the potential for Mr. Future Ninja to be a better game down the road is there, for sure. Add a couple of level packs that crank up the difficulty, and bring some additional complexity to the solid mechanics at hand, and Mr. Future Ninja becomes a must-have. Granted, we live in the launch-well-or-die App Store, but what’s here might be enough to encourage the game to be a sustained hit, as is also true for those who succeed in mobile gaming. I wouldn’t buy Mr. Future Ninja on the promise that it will get future content – I don’t know anything about that yet – but it’s easy to see where it could, and perhaps buying it will be the key to making that happen. The core of Mr. Future Ninja is quite solid, it just needs to be more filling before it’s a strong recommendation.

Although there’s a tenuous narrative involved, you don’t really need to pay attention to it and it doesn’t really pay off. Several seconds into Citadel 1986 you’re thrown into what seems to be a dangerous labyrinth full of keys, only to be greeted by a giant television screen. Come to find out it’s a literal citadel created 30 years ago, full of decaying old machines hell-bent on revenge, with a mysterious creator at the source. I actually like that there’s some attempt to connect the plot with the fact that you’re squaring off against forgotten technology, but again, it’s more like window dressing than anything substantial.

The bulk of your time in Citadel 1986 will be spent platforming through relatively fresh courses, blocked off by segments littered with the aforementioned keys. If you collect enough you can move on to the next area, and so on. Although it is broken up into sections it is technically one giant board, which adds some allure to the whole affair even if you’re just going to be exploring bits at a time (though there is some backtracking so be warned).

It’s tougher than it sounds though. Basically everything can kill you, and Spelunker (and more recently, Spelunky) style, you can instantly die if you fall too far. It’s not drastically difficult like a lot of the games it draws from (you can reasonably beat it in a few hours even if you die all the time), but with complete lack of combat abilities your own dexterity is your only defense.

Although a lot of the hazards and jumping puzzles were well crafted, the enemy sets on offer were pretty disappointing. Having to navigate various platforms that are weaving in and out of the foreground and deal with some simplistic, but effective water sequences was a lot of fun, but generally every adversary in the game looks and feels the same. They’re over-sized relics that essentially move back and forth– it’s something that gets old pretty fast outside of a few boss-like encounters.

All of the level transitions reminded me in a way of VVVVVV. They each have their own theme and moniker, and just like that classic, the checkpoint system is forgiving. More forgiving actually, as you keep the keys you’ve collected in an area, so if you launch yourself into the abyss going after a key you can keep it.

Although it bills itself as a Commodore 64 joint the entire style is a good mixture of both the 8 and 16-bit aesthetic. My favorite aspect is probably the distorted audio for the voices, which emulate those hackneyed attempts to get people to speak before the technology was really there yet. Although the voice work tends to all sound the same, it was a good attempt to add some uniqueness to Citadel 1986 that isn’t replicated as much today. In that way it’s very true to itself and doesn’t go overboard in just borrowing heavily used precepts of retro games.

After everything is said and done, all you have to show for your success is your time. There’s a constant timer on-screen at all times, something I didn’t really pay much attention to at first, which is tinted towards speedruns and replays. But given the rather unsatisfying conclusion, I think I’m good just having played it once, or maybe going back to it every so often after placing it in my “keep" folder.

Citadel 1986 is unremarkable at first glance and shines the more you experience it. While playing through many zones I had a visible smile on my face, wading through water for the next key, not wanting to put it down, and being positively reinforced after a death with a quick restart. But only the most dedicated of retro enthusiasts will get anything out of it compared to some of the more inspired work being released on mobile devices today.

Now, Sennheiser has made a few entries into the gaming headset market, and there seems to be a similar family of headphones in the Game Zero, Game One, and PC 373D. The Game Zero is closed back, the Game One is open-back and features an analog cable, while the 373D comes with one cable, a digital dongle that you plug into your source. For iOS users, what’s cool is that if you have a USB camera connection kit adapter, the USB dongle works natively on iOS. The downside is that this adapter is $29 (unofficial ones, such as this handy cable, keep getting broken by iOS updates, thanks Apple) so if you don’t have one already then it might not be in your wheelhouse. The connection into the headphones is 2.5mm TRRS, so you can get an analog-only cable for these. With a 50 ohm impedance and 116 dB sensitivity, you should get near-ideal volume from most consumer-grade headphone outputs. The plug design is such that it looks like it’ll be tough to get an aftermarket cable from anyone but Sennheiser. Sennheiser’s cables are certainly affordable enough for $16.95 for a TRRS termination (which you can use an adapter to get it in separate TRS/TRS headphone/mic connections), but it’s not on Amazon if you wanted something super fast. Still, I’d put in an order for this cable if you want to use it on everything you have, though the USB dongle will work ideally on PC, and should be functional on mobile and PS4. If Apple ever approved a micro-USB to Lightning cable for DACs (the micro-USB adapter that Apple sells is not for external accessories) then this would be perfect for the 373D.

The PC 373D’s USB dongle has a clever design, where the 2.5mm TRRS cable, which is 1.7m long, terminates in the dongle and has a micro USB female port. What this means is that you can customize the length depending on the length of the micro-USB cable you choose. The included micro-USB cable is 1.2m, but you can use your own if you want a shorter or possibly even longer connection to your source. How about volume control? The volume control on the cups is an analog volume attenuator, which may not be ideal as you could be losing some dynamic range with this kind of volume control. Additionally, the lowest volume is not a true mute, so if you want to use this as a quick way to hear the outside world, it won’t do that. It feels like a suboptimal combo, combining the possible downsides of digital volume control (such as if the volume being output to the headphones is just changing the digital volume or if it’s affecting the actual analog volume going to the headphones) with the weaknesses of passive volume attenuation. The microphone mutes when you raise it upward, which is a nifty function. You can hear an audible click, too. Despite the headphones being open-back, you don’t have to worry about the microphone picking up audio leaking out.

What does it mean for headphones to be open-back? It means that sound will leak out from the ear cups of these headphones. The benefit is that you get a more natural, wider sound. Closed-back headphones, while ideal for portable usage and often for enhancing bass, can suffer from resonance issues due to the closed earcups. The PC 373D is not meant for on-the-go usage, but primarily for home usage. What is interesting is that these headphones feature rather strong bass, making them isolate better than they otherwise would. Isolating low frequencies is the toughest form of isolation to get, and these seem to do a good enough job at that. If you like hip-hop and modern music, these feel particularly attuned for these genres. But the bass doesn’t feel as tight and controlled as other headphones in the audiophile range that I’ve used, it has more of a boomy quality that feels like it blends too much into the mids for my preferences. These headphones have a quality soundstage to them. It might pale to something like you might get from an open AKG headphone, but it’s still rather good for most consumer-grade headphones. The headband could be a bit denser, as it feels like my head is touching the headband up top, not providing enough cushioning. The earpads, which are velour, feature sizable ear cups that should contain even the largest of ears.

One of the things I love about my Sennheiser HD580 headphones are that they’re modularly designed to where you could actually assemble a set yourself with spare parts sold by Sennheiser. While I don’t know if you could do that with the 373D, the good news is that you can buy replacement earpads for sure. The headband doesn’t look like it’s easily replaceable, and Sennheiser doesn’t list part numbers for everything, but contacting their support should help you out. At worst, you have a 2-year international warranty with these headphones, and Sennheiser generally makes durable products.

The PC 373D does feel optimally designed for PC. One annoying factor is that while the Dolby Headphone seems to use some form of internal surround on PC (a test in Windows plays back all surround speakers), that means that it only works on PC. Dolby Headphone can work with stereo sources, but the button to activate it won’t work on non-PC platforms. The HyperX Cloud II’s virtual 7.1 didn’t use a 7.1 source, but at least it was platform agnostic if you wanted that boost in surround field. I don’t think the effect is worth it, particularly here where the sound feels like it gets too tinny and compressed to be any good despite the advantages in soundstaging. As well, you lose configuration options for sidetone, noise canceling, and basic equalization if you’re not on Windows. Moving some of these options to the dongle would have been fantastic.

The problem with the PC 373D is just that it sits in an odd middle ground of quality. The headphones sound better than many headsets, and have a sleek look to them that’s mature without being too mature. But you can do better if you want wider sound, and if you want more bass. And the various gaming features are of limited utility depending on your setup. And the exclusion of the analog cable feels like a missing opportunity to make these an even more versatile product. While I like the headset microphone and its functionality, for the $250 MSRP (though they’re about $210 on Amazon as of writing), you might be better off getting a set of headphones that you like – even something like the Sennheiser HD598 which can normally be found in the $100-$150 range, and bringing your own microphone in the ModMic, an external clip-on mic, or an unofficial third-party option like this, might not be a better option. But then again, if these drawbacks don’t sound like they’d be a weak point in your setup, you could do a lot worse than the PC 373D.

The main draw of Quantum Revenge is its stellar presentation that seeks to re-create an anime/mech feel, which constantly straddles the line of creating something new and relying too heavily on the past. The stellar soundtrack by Goldchimes, which leans quite a bit on electronica helps, but the character designs range from forgettable to “yeah, I can see that actually being in a real anime." It’s kind of the same thing in terms of its engine, as you’ll often look at the background with a sense of wonder before you focus in on some of the less inspired particle effects. Still, for something created from the ground-up for a mobile device it’s impressive all the same.

It’s tough to make a twin-stick shooter work on smaller devices, but the team does it. One analog stick handles movement, and the other, weaponry — with a third power-up button thrown in for good measure. The action can get hectic, especially if you’re playing with a handset and not a tablet, but the adaptive sticks do work in your favor more often than not. The freedom of being able to move around a vast amount of screen real estate to dodge enemy fire and return your own is galvanized by the vast expanse of space at your disposal. MFi controller support out of the gate helps a lot, and I wish Apple was pushing the initiative harder, as more and more people don’t even know it’s an option.

For as exciting as it looks, Quantum Revenge‘s main weakness is its inability to provide interesting enemy waves that keep you jazzed up throughout. Its boss encounters are great, as are many of the aforementioned environments, but the Asteroids-style cannon fodder can get old — this is something that greatly benefits from being played in short spurts. While space is freeing in a sense, it also limits the wow factor when jumping from stage to stage.

I do like the constant swap between orientations though on-screen. In some instances you’re in an open arena battling it all at all sides. Then during a boss battle the game might change into a vertical shooter momentarily, or force a horizontal skirmish. It’s a cool idea and really highlights the best part of the game — the big end battles. If there were more of those, even if the game was mostly relegated to an arena-like format, it probably would have been easier to constantly return to with that “just one more" feeling.

The good news is that you can do that without having to worry about messy timers or ads, but there is an IAP system for currency.  It’s quite sloppy too, as purchases are in odd increments that are almost meant to confuse you (144,000 for $2.99, 58,500 for $1.99, and 14,000 for $0.99). Credits are used to unlock new mechs (fighters), which range from 25,000 to 100,000, and upgrades, which are in the median range of around 5,000 per piece of equipment. It’s not ideal, but it’s something that can be readily ignored. I went through the entire game without spending anything beyond what I naturally earned, and only did so for the sake of testing.

I can definitely see Realteach VR returning to the world of Quantum Revenge in the future and building on the foundation they’ve already set. Although battling the evil Rokuseya was a blast while it lasted, I’d love to see some of the cast get fleshed out in the sequel, and see some brasher and more bold mech designs. If you’re still the type of person who’s rooting for a Zoids reboot you’ll probably have a great time here, but otherwise you can likely hang on for more updates and improvements — some of which the developer has already acquiesced.

The levels are procedurally generated, and there’s a few rather recognizable chunks that you’ll see. This is fine, as it gives the game a feeling of familiarity that you can recognize. But I do know that there’s one intro chunk where you’re basically trapped if you don’t use a detonator. The game does a good enough job otherwise of making you not feel trapped if you get into a dead end, but at least you have plenty of bombs to help you along the way. Starting out with 8 doesn’t mean that you won’t ever run out, but it does mean that you can be pretty liberal in your usage. You start with 3 health, and while it’s possible to get healing and maximum health extensions, this isn’t necessarily a guarantee. Taking any kind of damage from spikes or traps is ill-advised.

The items you get will have a significant effect on how you play. Some runs are sparser with good items than others. Meanwhile, I’ve had runs where I’ve wound up with a massive arsenal of items at my disposal. The jetpack is the real bringer of doom, because the flames can destroy the guns and lasers that are out to wreck your existence. This item is massively overpowered, and it changes the entire run if and when you find it. Perhaps making it only able to propel you in the air for short periods of time would be better. But it does play a role where it, like some other items, can make each run unique. And there’s some great moments that happen too. Make a tight escape from a dangerous trap when low on health, and the feeling is palpable. Dodge dangerous electric bolts and feel like a wizard. Finding secrets feels great, too. Some of them require things like the classic visor, or just having the right item in a run at the right time, but it’s nice to know that those elements are there.

The lighting is fantastic in Meganoid, which it has been in Orangepixel games since Space Grunts ($3.99). It does play a role, as some levels wind up being much darker than others, and you have to use glow sticks in order to make the level visible. It’s just a cool visual flourish that makes this game look quite good, to go along with Orangepixel’s typical chunky-pixel visual style.

The touch controls are pretty standard Orangepixel fare. They work fine, though the issue is that if you mess up and accidentally hit a wrong direction or the wrong action button, you could accidentally find yourself in danger. And the problem is that this is not a game like Gunslugs 2 ($2.99) where there’s lot of health pickups that make the game feel elastic to go along with the loose feeling that the game otherwise has. Here, that feeling of looseness is a problem because the game is so unforgiving.

Thankfully, Orangepixel has thrown in MFi controller support for the game. I think the experience is a lot better when you have physical buttons. A game like this that relies on tight platforming and precision control because there’s not much margin for error really shines more with physical controls. If you can, that’s the best way to play. The one thing I wish the controls would have would be an option to swap left and right between items using shoulder buttons instead of just having to tap the item button. Also, why is jump not set to A? We live in a civilized society, we haven’t come all this way to not have A be the default jump button!

The problem with making a Spelunky-lite is that Spelunky is a tough game to imitate. It was developed over several years by Derek Yu, and it required both the free PC release along with the later Xbox 360/PC/etc. versions to make it get to the point that it became game designer pornography. If you come at the king, you best not miss. Now, there’s obviously the mobile filter that I would apply to Meganoid where Spelunky isn’t going to be a mobile game. It’s made for physical controls, and there’s a precision to the game that just can’t really be adapted in the same way. I hate bringing this up in the context of mobile games, since the platform gets way too much nonsense from people who haven’t spent enough time with touch controls to realize that as you get used to the lack of tactility, you have a better feel for these games…and there’s a generation growing up that has touch controls feel as natural to them as playing first-person shooters with thumbsticks feels. But, there is a certain degree of precision on the outliers that really doesn’t work all that well on touchscreens, or at least the lack of tactility reveals major flaws. Meganoid to me is one of those games. Combine that with the fact that this is a quickly-made project, and it just can’t live up to the lofty heights of the game that inspired it. It’s a thoroughly okay game, but there’s not a lot like it on mobile. Perhaps that’s for a reason?

The very heart of MLB Manager is the same as last year’s and 2015’s entry which I reviewed. The series has its roots on mobile previously as the iOOTP games, before then getting official MLB licenses. The games have their origins in Out of the Park Baseball, a deep-dive baseball simulator that MLB Manager tries to simplify down. There’s still a lot of deep aspects to this game, but where you’re running a team in a current-day, historic, or entirely fictional league. There’s a lot of information to take in, but you can manage games on a pitch-by-pitch level, or only on a larger, general-manager-only level, dealing with finances and letting the computer manage all the games. The problem is that the core game is almost identical to the iOOTP games, and granted, baseball simulators don’t need massive updates. They need a few tweaks to catch up to current trends, the occasional roster update, and necessary changes based on user feedback.

This year, the big change is visual. MLB Manager 2017 boasts an overhauled look. A lot of the menus look the same and are structured the same way, but the cartoon characters are gone, and the whole game looks sleeker and more professional. Perhaps the cartoon characters added some personality, but I don’t really miss them after several iterations of this game. Menus now display a lot more in the way of statistics and information than they did before, even text boxes look better and use more of the high-resolution displays that are now the norm. Still, the core game is the same. And that means many of the annoying quirks and flaws are still here, and a few new ones have popped up.

Some of the language of the simulations feel like they need to be changed. For example, the talk of sliding hard into second base feels outdated when 2016 saw the initiation of the new sliding regulations. Guys just aren’t sliding in hard to second base as much because they don’t want to risk the possibility of getting an automatic double play due to interference, as well as the potential for gruesome injury to the fielder. And sometimes, the embarrassment of the slider. As well, some of the talk of guys arguing calls or shooting nasty looks to umpires when involving close plays on the base paths has been replaced in the age of instant replay by guys largely shooting looks over to their dugout, pleading for a replay call. And the lack of that feels like a missing aspect. I guess you could justify it by saying that all calls in the game are technically correct, but there’s still something about that which feels just unrealistic enough to be jarring.

A bug in the current version is that you can’t move the pitcher slot around in the lineup, or decide to bat your pitcher instead of the DH. Both these things happened in 2016! In fact, there’s strategy with batting your worst hitter 8th, so that your 9th hitter serves as a second leadoff man, though the tradeoff is that a worse hitter might get a few more plate appearances over the course of 162 games, and you may have to pinch hit a pitcher sooner. But you can’t do it in this year’s MLB Manager, though this is a bug as you could in previous years. You can set the current day’s pitcher as the DH, and they’ll remain in the lineup even if taken off the mound. While I believe this is how the DH rule works in college for two-way players, in MLB the pitcher can’t also be the DH. Like when Madison Bumgarner hit for himself at Oakland in 2016, he was there in the lineup as the pitcher, not the DH. He’s one of the few players where you would possibly consider it if the rest of your team is bad – maybe Jake Arrieta or Travis Wood would be decent options as well, or if you wind up with a drafted player who has some two-way talent. Still, I hope this gets fixed because it is an MLB rule, and I would like to see authenticity whenever possible.

While I’d be fascinated to see this game work in portrait mode for ultimate portable play, MLB Manager remaining virtually the same since its inception has meant a few things. One, as processing power has increased, the wait time for simulations has shrunk. Two, the game drains virtually no battery. It’s far superior to using Twitter. Also, the game still supports being able to quit at any point, and continuing at the exact moment in the game you were playing. I know people want this feature in more titles, and MLB Manager has it perfect.

I still love many of the little things that you can mess around with in this game. One thing I enjoy is that you can change is the name of each team. Think Cleveland’s team name is racist? Not in your world! Think the St. Louis Cardinals should be renamed the St. Louis Farts that play at A Dumpster Fire, or that the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is the dumbest team name in existence and that Anaheim is so far away from Los Angeles with rush hour traffic that it doesn’t actually count as Los Angeles? The world is your oyster. You can configure teams’ city names, colors, nicknames, and stadium names to your heart’s desire. You can’t upload your own logos, so the Tampa Bay Rays renamed the Montreal Expos still have the Tampa Bay logo. The player editor options are great if you see something that’s just not quite right (or if you want to add yourself to the game as a superstar, no judgment here, folks). And again,, you can play this game as granularity as you want. I like playing each game myself, in particular because I like managing my bullpen in ways that the AI won’t do. The AI management is meant to be realistic, and “real" managers handle their bullpens in the most asinine manner. I’m bringing closers in the 6th, dogs and cats living together…mass hysteria! But that’s the fun: I get to play the game my way. Despite all my complaints, they’re because this is a game meant to be a long-term experience. And the problem with that is that it can be easy to pick nits over time.

Perhaps my problem is that I won’t get what I want. MLB Manager is intentionally meant to be a simpler experience compared to the desktop OOTP. Maybe the solution is to get a Windows tablet, as shocking as that may be to express on this website. I love playing MLB Manager wherever I feel like, but after seeing the same game with subtle tweaks on a year after year basis since 2011, I know I’m ready for something bigger. I want full rules for roster management. I want full minor league affiliates. I want more control. I might not get it because it could be overwhelming to someone wanting to play casually, but I’m starting to realize that I maybe out-growing MLB Manager and need to just accept that I should play OOTP on my laptop from now on like the baseball-loving degenerate that I am.

Not that I won’t keep playing MLB Manager and struggle in vain against the baseball gods to make my Texas Rangers win a World Series. Because despite all my complaints about little things, I’m hooked once again. Send help. This is the only way to get a good, deep, baseball simulator on mobile, and it is a good way to get a taste of what it might be like in comparison to a full-fledged game. If it’s your first time, I’m sorry about the rest of your life that you will no longer have because you’re stuck managing a bases loaded, one-out situation in an August 2023 game. It could be the most value you get out of a $4.99 game. If the little annoyances got to be too much in earlier years, well, unfortunately, many of them are still here. But whether you can see the forest for the trees is question you’ll have to consider for yourself.

Kami is a game about matching colors with as few moves as possible. It uses folding paper as its artistic conceit, but it’s really more like trying to use the flood-fill tool on a paint program to fill the entire screen with only a few clicks. Each stage presents a multi-colored pattern and a par number you need to aim for. Simply choose a color, tap an area, and all of the connected paper of that color will flip and fold into the new color. Make the whole screen one color and you’re all done. In Kami 2, you have to do it within the par number of moves to actually beat the stage. Do that and you’ll earn a Perfect Badge, which is essential to unlocking medals and opening up new stages.

Kami 2 is a lot like the first game, except with much more content. There are over 100 stages in the standard Journey mode, enough to keep anyone busy for quite some time. In addition, there are also daily puzzles to solve, and an edit mode where players can create and share their own puzzles. As this game can be had for free as opposed to the first game’s up-front price tag, you’re probably wondering where the catch is. The curious thing is that there really isn’t one. You don’t have to worry about ads, timers, or any of that stuff. Journey mode is fully playable off-line, and while the other two modes require a connection, that makes perfect sense. No, Kami 2 aims to earn its money the old-fashioned way. It wants to make you cry for help, and then charge you for it.

Basically, the game monetizes in a few simple ways. The main things it’s looking to sell are packs of hints. If you have hints, you can use them to see exactly one move towards your goal. The game will give you the first one for free, but after that, you’ll have to buy them if you want more. There are also some special palettes you can unlock via IAPs that simply give you some fancy options in the edit mode. The game doesn’t wave these potential purchases in your face. In fact, you probably won’t even see them unless you go looking for them. If you can clear the stages on your own, you won’t need to give Kami 2 so much as a single cent, and there’s nothing stopping you from doing just that if you’re clever enough.

Fair warning, though. Kami 2 gets really, really tough. Some of the later puzzles require you to make fifteen or more moves in just the right sequence to meet par, so you’re going to have to think things through carefully. This is where Kami makes a few mistakes, however. I fully appreciate the complex puzzles, and I’m even okay with the par being a requirement for beating the stage. What I don’t like is that if you make an incorrect move, you have to start the puzzle from scratch. With turn-based games like this, the ability to move back even one step is a major convenience. Having to retrace 10 or more moves to get back to where you were isn’t challenging or interesting. It’s just annoying. Even worse, that gorgeous folding animation that plays whenever you swap a color can’t be turned off or skipped. So you not only have to retrace your moves, you have to do it slowly. In earlier levels this is a minor issue, but the farther in you go, the more aggravating it becomes.

Besides all of that, Kami 2 suffers from its mechanics getting a little repetitive over the long haul in Journey mode. The game makes a good effort of teaching players as it goes, with the stages arranged in groups of six similar but increasingly complex layouts. The sentiment behind that is appreciated, but so many of the stages feel like filler as a result, and that’s as true for stage 103 as it is for stage 7. I felt more engaged with the first game’s significantly smaller set of levels because each one stood out more. In Kami 2, it feels like you’re told to color a fire engine, then turn the page and color a slightly more detailed fire engine, then color the even more detailed fire engine on the following page. I’m tired of this fire engine already.

By far, the better part of Kami 2 is found in the user-created levels. There seems to be a well-populated list with new entries appearing frequently thus far, so it’s already quite active. There are a few different filters to choose from, and users can help curate the levels by giving a little heart to the ones they think are good. They’re not all winners, but there are more than enough to choose from that you ought to be able to find many enjoyable puzzles to solve. The only problem here is that this mode requires you to connect to a server, which is an issue not just in the sense that you need to be online, but also that any server problems will result in the mode not functioning. I only mention this because during the period in which I played Kami 2 for review, I frequently received messages that I couldn’t play the non-Journey modes in spite of my connection being fine.

Kami 2 is a gorgeous puzzle game packed with challenging content, but it allows its sense of style to get in the way of a smooth experience for the player. It’s fine that the game throws out difficult and complex puzzles, but the game seemingly goes out of its way to make the process of solving those challenges as tedious as possible. Between its generous pay model, stunning presentation, and heaps of puzzles to solve, Kami 2 is probably worth taking at least a few swings at. It’s at least a few folds away from the gameplay living up to the slick visual designs, however, and there are clearly some kinks to work out with the online modes.

The Deep Paths comes to us from Steve Jarman, who previously developed Coldfire Keep ($4.99) and Descend RPG ($1.99). It’s very much along the same lines as those two games. You guide a group of adventurers into a multi-floor dungeon full of puzzles and monsters and try to come out alive. The game is played entirely from a first-person perspective, and plays out in a hybrid turn-based/real-time fashion as in games like Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Master. That is to say, you move one turn at a time, but time can pass whether you take an action or not. In combat, you have to move quickly, as each character will only attack when their turn comes up if you tell them to. Many puzzles will also require you to move with speed if you want to make it through. Doors will often open for a short period of time only, and certain traps require good timing to get past.

The high-watermark for this kind of game on iOS so far is Legend of Grimrock ($4.99). Regrettably, The Deep Paths isn’t really in that game’s league. If you’ve never played this kind of game before and want to get your toes a little wet, I’d advise trying Grimrock first. The Deep Paths has some issues that can probably only be forgiven by someone who wants to play this genre to begin with. That said, there aren’t exactly a ton of first-person dungeon crawlers releasing on the App Store, and the problems in The Deep Paths aren’t enough for me to tell a hungry genre fan to shove the plate away. In fact, when things are at their best, The Deep Paths is nearly great. It’s definitely Jarman’s best so far, and feels light-years ahead of Descend RPG. The Deep Paths also addresses some of the complaints people had about Coldfire Keep, though some of that game’s irritating issues remain.

You’ll start off by rolling up your party of four characters. There are three different job classes to choose from, so you’ll have to double up on at least one of them. Warriors do more or less what you would expect, being the best at melee attacking and taking hits. Rogues aren’t quite as strong as warriors, but can pick the locks on treasure chests and detect hidden doors. Basically, you’ll need one of them. Mages are the only characters who can make use of magic wands, and can also brew up potions. They’re quite weak at melee combat, so make sure you keep them in the back row. After you’ve put together your party, you get to play a sort of tutorial area. It’ll teach you the basics and give you some supplies to start with.

This is probably where you’ll realize one of the bigger problems with The Deep Paths. The user interface is really cumbersome and somewhat confusing at times. Moving around uses on-screen buttons, which works well enough. Picking up some objects requires a tap, while others need you to drag the item to a character portrait to put it in your party’s inventory. Some items can be automatically used by tapping on what you’re trying to use, but others will require you to drag the item out of your bag with a double-tap and place it on what you’re trying to use it with. If you’re playing on an iPhone, you get the additional fun of some of the buttons being a little too small to work with accurately. It feels like an interface designed for a roomy monitor with a mouse pointer. Saving and loading are especially annoying for how small the elements you need to touch are. Now, to be fair, this is a little bit better than the set-up in Coldfire Keep, but it’s close enough that if you had problems there you probably aren’t going to be happy here.

Another carry-over problem from Coldfire Keep comes with the combat. It’s just not very fun or all that deep. There are a few tactics you can employ to help your odds, but you’re mostly going to be doing the same set of actions for the entirety of the game. Whether or not you survive each encounter will come down to luck or pure stats. There aren’t enough enemy types, or rather, not enough enemy behaviors to really make things interesting. Just fire away your projectile attacks at a distance, and when the enemy closes, start hacking away. You can pull off a little side-stepping trick if there’s enough space to work with, but there often isn’t. So you just tap those weapons to attack, wait for the cool-down, attack again, and hope the bad guy runs out of hit points first. One nice thing is that you’ll automatically regain health and spirit points over time, and even dead characters will bounce back to life after a little while so long as someone is still among the living. Generally speaking, encounters are spaced out such that you have plenty of time to recover while walking, or no time at all, so waiting around to refill your life and spirit is rarely a useful tactical move.

While the combat is something of a downer, the puzzles and exploration aspects are even better than they were in Coldfire Keep. It took me in the neighborhood of 15 hours to get through the game when all was said and done, and I know I missed a couple of secrets along the way. I don’t know that I’m particularly inclined to go back for them at this point, but if you were being more thorough than I was, The Deep Paths would certainly come out a bit longer. The dungeon design is once again quite solid with lots of side paths, alternate routes, and secret rooms. One thing I really like about Jarman’s approach to dungeon design is that unlike some other dungeon crawlers, he doesn’t treat floors as totally separate entities from one another. You’ll often find yourself heading up and down at different positions to find the way forward.

Unfortunately, that complexity is a double-edged sword. While first-person dungeon crawlers have made something of a resurgence lately, almost all of them have seen fit to include some kind of auto-mapping feature. Yes, I like drawing maps too, but the truth is that most people don’t want to use a pencil and paper while they’re playing games these days, particularly in a game they’ll likely be playing on the go. The Deep Paths makes one concession to that end. You can find maps of each floor hidden around in various places. Rather awkwardly, however, the map is drawn relative to your direction, and with no clear markers about which way is which. Some people will be okay with that, but as the dungeon floors get trickier, the maps become increasingly useless, even if you do manage to find them. I’m not sure what the best option here is, since a full-on automap really goes against the spirit of what this game is going for. You’re almost certainly going to need maps one way or another, though, and the ones the game provides aren’t going to work for everyone.

The puzzles are a nice grab-bag of different tasks and teasers, and some of them require some real thinking. In Jarman’s usual style, your progress forward is typically blocked by a door that requires a key. Locating that key will usually require you to solve one or more puzzles or find a secret area of some kind. It’s rare for you to get keys too much before you need them, so most of the time, you know that the answers to the puzzles can be found in a particular area. Sure, you can brute force your way through some of them, but that’s always the case with games like this one. Figuring out the answers yourself is quite satisfying. I feel like the puzzle difficulty follows a smooth curve that builds on things you’ve already solved to create more interesting and challenging set-ups. This time around, you can take your time solving puzzles without worrying about hunger. That particular mechanic was a source of annoyance in Coldfire Keep, so I’m not terribly sad to see it gone.

While this sub-genre doesn’t always go hand in hand with having much of a story at all, The Deep Paths takes a couple of stabs at justifying why you’re in the dungeon, a reason for the puzzles to exist, and even some minor character-building. Your party members will sometimes chat with each other, though that serves as instruction as much as it does world-building. It’s not much, and I certainly wouldn’t come into this game expecting much from a story point of view, but I at least appreciate the attempt. It helps keep you engaged early on while the game mechanics get themselves good and sunk into your brain.

Fans of the genre who are willing to overlook some irritating flaws will find The Deep Paths worth exploring. It nicely demonstrates the developer’s increasing skill in designing this kind of game, and is easy to recommend over its immediate predecessor. It errs more towards a vintage feel than a modern one, however, and that can sometimes be as off-putting as it is inviting. It spends little time building up its difficulty both in terms of combat and puzzles, which when combined with its overall unfriendly UI and mapping makes it a hard game to suggest for a general audience. Those who love first-person dungeon crawlers should check it out, though. It’s no Grimrock, but I think there’s plenty of room in the pool for decent efforts along with that giant.

Yep, each level has a starting and an end point to get to. Your job is to aim (by way of sliding a finger) a ball and get it to the goal (a simple dot). But there’s a slight catch, as the ball bounces off walls, and bounces precisely six times every volley. Oh, and you have a limited number of moves (four) to achieve your goal. It feels like I’m just padding it on, but that’s it — six bounces, four moves, every map.

One thing I appreciate is how Incidence gives you just enough to succeed without necessarily giving it away. When angling your shot, a marker will show you the first bump. Beyond that, and divining what the subsequent five bumps will do is up to you. There’s no options to toggle it to easy mode or take away the marker, which would have been appreciated, but there’s a serene middle ground with the decision to just have it be a lone assist. If you screw up following through is quick enough, but there’s also a lone “X" in the top right to tap to restart.

It’s a level of repetition that works for Incidence, as the minimalist style isn’t ever in your face or annoying. Some levels blend together but it all adds up to a zen-like feel, and the layouts are tough enough to not bore you outright. Over time you’ll start to figure out moves before you take them, just like pool. “If I bounce it here, it’ll continue bouncing back to the start, or if I hit it here, it’ll bounce right near the goal so I can just tap it in" is a common sequence of thoughts in any given level, and as minimal as it looks, it’s surprisingly deep. The sounds that the game makes when the ball bounces off each wall is also mesmerizing. But that’s basically it, as the sound direction is just as muted as the visuals — there’s no soundtrack or annoying “you did it!" congratulatory vocals, it just morphs into the next level.

The description tries to claim it’s a “vania" of some sort (clearly after the classic Castlevania, or more recently, the popular “Metroidvania" term to describe an action adventure that skews toward open world exploration), but that’s simply not present. Progression is solely linear, as you’re going from map to map without any exposition, story, or anything of the sort. Some levels do offer choices and feel open, sure, but that’s where any semblance of a comparison ends.

100 levels is what you’re getting, no strings attached, or taken away, as it were. There’s no power-ups or bonuses of the sort, or currency to keep track of. No, it’s just your skill and your wits making it through seemingly insurmountable challenges, until you finish them and you’re done. It’s the kind of thing I’m inclined to pick up and replay every so often, but once you really get the hang of Incidence‘s unique “bounce" physics, you’ll likely breeze past the initial salvo of arenas anyway.

I wish there was a little more to Incidence, but I had a great time learning its rulesets and mastering them. By the time I hit level 100 I felt like a pro, but there wasn’t anything left to conquer. I have a feeling that any updates probably won’t incrementally increase the difficulty or expand upon the concept (as the complete onboard set doesn’t either, it’s more of a moderate slow build). Right now Incidence simply is what it is, but puzzle fiends should have a grand old time picking it up while it lasts.

So, let’s get the important part out of the way first. This is a good port. There’s no obvious lag as we saw in the Mega Man ports, the music is intact, and everything seems to be running at the right speed. I can’t say with certainty that this is the arcade version, but if it isn’t, whoever did the port did their homework. I compared it with the version of the game included on the old Capcom Classics Collection and other than the mobile version looking a whole lot sharper, I couldn’t spot any obvious differences. The mobile version includes a new casual mode that gives you a full assortment of power-ups with each new life and automatically pulls off the loop move if you take a direct hit, provided you have any remaining loops in stock. If you want to play it the classic way, you can do that too. The game keeps track of your level progress either way, allowing you to continue where you left off. The controls and gameplay adapt quite well to mobile, so if all you’re worried about is if 1942 Mobile is a good way to play your old favorite shooter, I can safely say your pocket change is well-spent.

The next thing to consider is a bit trickier, which is whether 1942 is a game that people should want to play in the modern day if they don’t have any nostalgia for it. After all, it is the first game in its series, lacking many of the refinements and additions that came in later installments. It originally released in 1984, which puts it firmly in the middle of a period of significant advancement in the shoot-em-up genre. In a lot of ways, it feels as close to Galaga as it does to something like Tiger-Heli. And certainly, if I step outside of the expectations of the modern mobile market, it’s hard to say that 1942 isn’t worth buying for a cheaper price than running a few rounds on the arcade machine.

But we’re not really outside of those expectations, are we? Unhooked from nostalgia, 1942 comes up short against iOS’s rather robust shoot-em-up selection. While its 32-stage campaign is long by almost any shooter standards, you’re spending most of that time soaring over the same bits of terrain, shooting at the same palette-swapped planes that run in similar patterns throughout the whole game. Occasionally, you get a boss to break up the action, but there too we find a great deal of repetition. In its time, its selection of power-ups was a somewhat unusual and enjoyable addition, but now, a powered-up shot and a couple of helpers feels quite meager. Don’t even get me started on the music, which tries to go for a marching band feel but ends up sounding like someone blowing a whistle in your ear at random intervals. Even its once unique theme has been done so many times that it certainly doesn’t help it stand out.

The best argument I can make for the game is that it is still a pretty good challenge. In a sea of bullet hell games, 1942 Mobile feels fresh by relying on something old. The enemies will shoot at you, of course, and some of them fire enough bullets that you’ll have to move quickly to stay safe. The greater threat, however, is from the enemies crashing into you. The enemy planes swarm in a similar manner to the aliens from Galaga, turning and looping around, sometimes exiting the screen only to re-enter it from an unexpected angle. If you try to park at the bottom of the screen, you’re going to get hit sooner or later. So you need to take a more active role, dodging around to draw fire away and keep out of the way of enemy planes. There’s no curtain of bullets to squeeze between, but your hit box is a heck of a lot bigger than one pixel. Even with the casual mode and unlimited continues, you still have to exercise some serious skill if you want to make it all the way to Okinawa.

As already mentioned, Capcom did a nice job with this port. The game uses relative touch for the controls, and there are a bunch of options including being able to adjust the speed of the plane. The casual mode is a solid addition, giving you a fully powered-up plane and having the loop-de-loop automatically activate if you take a hit. The latter is particularly useful, as it can be tricky to get your finger over to the loop-de-loop button with the necessary precision otherwise. The classic mode is presented as-is, but offers up a few options to mess around with, too. Progress in either mode carries over to both, so if you’re finding classic mode rough, you can flip over to casual mode and carry on from the farthest stage you’ve reached. Annoyingly, leaderboards and achievements require logging in on a Google Account. I’m sure everyone has one by this point, and I guess with Apple’s de-emphasis of Game Center it’s reasonable for publishers to look elsewhere, but it’s just one more thing to log into.

There’s not much more to say about the game. If you were only wondering if 1942 Mobile was a good port as opposed to what we saw with the Mega Man train wrecks, you can buy the game with a clear conscience. It’s like having the arcade game in your pocket. If you’ve never played the game and are wondering if it’s worth picking up, I can say that it’s alright but it certainly feels like a game from its era in most ways. For the low asking price it’s fine, but don’t set your expectations too high just because it’s a big name.

In total, there are more than 60 pre-built dungeons to plumb your way through, with multiple difficulty settings available for each. If that’s not enough, there are also eight mansions that each feature multiple floors of procedurally-generated content. And if that’s not enough, there’s also a fairly entertaining PVP mode where players can challenge one another’s custom-built dungeons. In total, it took me a little over 15 hours to get through everything, a rather impressive length for a game like this. Unfortunately, I got somewhat tired of the game halfway through. There are a couple of reasons for that.

First, the gameplay doesn’t throw enough new tricks in as you go, making it feel like you’re doing the same things at the tenth hour that you were doing at the third. The new characters you recruit along the way add some spice into the mix, as each of them brings their own unique skills and abilities into your party. When you find someone new, there’s a rush of excitement as you see how they might fit into your party strategy. Unfortunately, the excitement is fleeting. Since characters only have a few skills each, you’ll soon fall into a familiar rhythm no matter who you’re using. Adding to the problem is that there simply isn’t enough variety in the enemy’s behavior. It doesn’t take a lot of work to find a good strategy, and whether or not it works typically depends on how experienced your party is compared to the enemies.

Which leads into the second reason why the game started to wear on me long before it finished. The pace at which both your characters develop and new equipment is made available is a little bit off of that of the increasing difficulty. There are points where you’re going to have to stop dead in your tracks and go back to earlier levels to grind. It’s not a quick process, either. Earning a single level takes a lot longer than it ideally should, making it feel like you’re spending a lot of time and not really getting anywhere. Useful new equipment is hard to come by, too. You’re meant to be crafting a lot of it, but it nevertheless comes out at a trickle. Even in cases where I had felt I had gathered up the best stuff available to me at any given moment, it never left me feeling powerful so much as it felt like meeting the minimum check for moving on.

Now, there’s a very real chance these things won’t bother you. Everyone has their own tolerance level towards grinding, and if you see this more as a game you fire up now and then to run a dungeon or two without putting a large focus on forward progress, you’re likely going to have a better time with Dungeon Rushers. The pre-built levels can get awfully tiresome to replay, but the mansions at least provide some variety each time you jump in. Taken as a series of bite-sized sessions as opposed to something to really sink yourself into, Dungeon Rushers fares far better. The story is silly enough to entertain you without requiring you to pay much attention over the long haul, the controls are easy to use, and stomping around a map looking for some loot and skulls to bash in can be quite enjoyable. Enjoy it in the moment and it’s easier to forgive how slowly real progress in the game is made.

It’s too bad, though, because there are a lot of things here that would work nicely towards a more engaging experience. Each character has quite a few equipment slots, the crafting system is surprisingly robust, and the individuality of each unit’s set of abilities makes for entertaining possibilities in battle. These aspects certainly point to something special for those seeking a more complex game. And the game does make a valiant effort at a continuous, if completely tongue-in-cheek, narrative. Some might find it a little too jokey for its own good, but I welcomed even the jokes that didn’t land if only to provide some much-needed stimulation during an arduous campaign.

Dungeon Rushers also enjoys a nice presentation. The pixel art is of good quality, and the audio does its job in backing up the fantasy atmosphere. The UI is fairly straightforward, though in places it feels like it’s slightly cramped on an iPhone. Constructing levels is easy enough to do, and if you get into that part of the game, you’ll certainly have a lot of extra enjoyment on your hands. The game offers a decent tutorial, but there are some useful things it won’t bother telling you about, so make sure you poke and drag around a bit. Speaking of the visuals, this is where you’ll find the game’s only IAP offerings. Each character has an alternate skin that is purely cosmetic. You can buy these individually for $0.99 or in a complete pack for $5.99. Other than that minor indulgence, the game is purely an upfront purchase.

While Dungeon Rushers offers a lot of fun for at least a few hours, some balance issues see it turn into something of a party guest that just doesn’t know when to go home. Even when it hits that point, it’s not as though it becomes actively unpleasant. It’s just a bit wearisome and out of new topics. If you don’t mind the idea of making slow progress through a game through a ton of shorter sessions, you’ll probably have a blast with Dungeon Rushers. In that sense, it’s probably better on mobile than it was as a PC game, but I feel like the game could have satisfied both types of experiences if the pace were only a little bit quicker.

This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about freemium fan service games, which are more often than not tied to some anime property. They mostly all follow the same freemium trends and mechanics, and they’re pretty much all Namco Bandai mobile games! Stuff like Digimon Heroes (Free), Tales of Link (Free), Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle (Free), and even One Piece: Treasure Cruise (Free). Thousand Storm is more of the same, but the gameplay segments actually showcase what One Piece is about: Mowing down waves of scrubs with your awesome zany powers to get to the main fights with much tougher main baddies. Instead of some take on a match-3 or card game you’ll direct beloved characters around the field and decide when to use their power attacks. It’s not anything to write home about in terms of depth or complexity, but it’s a nice change of pace.

You’ll start out in one of the 4 main seas of the world (North, South, East, and West Blue) and with our main hero and captain of the Straw Hat Pirates, Monkey D Luffy, plus either Zoro, Sanji, Nami, or Usopp, depending on where you start. After the starting tutorial island, you’ll enter the proper story of the anime, but not from the beginning. From the Sabody Archipelago arc, which bookends the 2 year time skip. This is why you’ll see variations on certain characters like Luffy and Zoro with “2 Years Ago” or “New World” attached to their names. The time skip in the anime brought with it new main outfits and new abilities after all that time of training. Sorry for the brief anime nerd-ing. This show has 777 episodes, plus occasional movies and specials, and I have seen almost all of them, save for a few filler arcs and the most recent couple episodes. The story of the game currently stops in the previous arc at Dressrosa, just as an FYI for fans who know what the heck I’m talking about.

Each mission takes you through 2 or 3 little hallway stages, with the last stage always involving a boss fight. Sometimes it’s a generic tough enemy boss and sometimes it’s a famous enemy from the show. Stamina mechanics rear their ugly heads as usual, along with three forms of currency. The main currency used for general in game stuff are Bellies, the in-world currency of the anime. The second are Rainbow Coins, the premium currency, used for things like stamina refills and second, third, and fourth extra tries at the level you’re currently super under-leveled for. The final currency is friend points, which are a nice freebie. You get them for playing with up to two other people on a mission. You don’t need them for anything, but you can use them to buy extra scene cards. Scene cards are where all your character’s stats and abilities come from. More on that in a bit.

Gameplay is serviceable, but the real draw of this game is the nostalgia and fan service. Seeing cute, almost chibi like renditions of the heroes throwing out their famous moves is neat. Like with most of these games, character collection is half of the fun. You gain certain character tokens just by playing the story, but special characters can only be earned through timed events. The last event had post-time skip Luffy and Usopp, and the current event gives you access to post-time skip Brook and more Luffy. (You’ll see a lot of New World Luffy) Brook, by the way, is a skeleton and a musician, but also a swordsman. I promise this all makes sense in the context of the world. The story has always had silly nonsensical stuff in it as part of the world building, but it’s always consistent with itself. Like the Transponder Snails. These are snails… with me so far? That are basically cell phones. This has been unexplained for over a decade, and the fan-base has just kind of accepted it.

In this game, snails come in movie projector form. When you spend rainbow coins or friend points at the theater, you’ll get a number of new cards. Rainbow coins get you the most powerful stuff, but the friend packs are quite valuable. Scene cards also include food cards for leveling up your regular scene cards (Naturally, the cliché hunk of anime meat is the mightiest, so sayeth Luffy, future king of all pirates), money cards for selling (though you can sell any card), and evolution cards. Once a card maxes out its level, you’ll need evolution cards to break through to the next rarity, resetting the card to level 1 but increasing overall stats and raising the max level. You can only have up to 150 cards. Allegedly, anyway. Because I went over 150 and I’m not sure anything happened. The number out of 150 was just red instead of white. I hope they don’t eventually get eaten by the game, because evolution cards are the biggest pain in the game.

You can only get evolution cards by completing daily missions, which is easy enough. But there is enough variety that you will get a different kind every day, and you won’t be able to get that kind again until the next week. Expect to spend loads of time sitting on maxed out cards, and either leveling weaker cards instead or just accepting that your time is meaningless because you don’t want to lower your stats. Your power comes not only from high level scene cards, but also a higher-level character. Each level gives you access to more slots to equip cards, and that’s how you get to some of the crazy high numbers you’ll see other people have. Getting a character to 4 stars is easy enough, and takes 25 character tokens, but 5 stars takes 60, and I don’t know what 6 stars requires.

The nice thing about this game is the multi-player. You see, playing a mission solo or hosting a mission costs stamina, but joining and helping someone else’s mission is free. For the first 11 or 12 levels, you could easily coordinate with 2 real life friends to rotate hosts and you’d probably level up consistently enough to just keep that going. I accepted going in that this game was probably going to be super grindy and a total time sink, but man is it ever. Between replaying missions for evolution cards or character tokens, there’s just so much busy work in navigating menus and feeding lesser cards to your superior ones and so on. And if you’re on an older device, like I am, you’ll deal with super obnoxious loading times. I’m talking like 5-10 seconds, but when you deal with that several times a minute going from menu to menu, it’s a pain. They were nice enough to only reset your daily login rewards every 10 days, so you don’t have to come back every single day. Though you probably should.

The graphics and effects are very nice for this kind of game. Especially if you have a newer device. If you’re okay with the grindy nature of these games, Thousand Storm will offer you a fun walk down memory lane. I’d love to see more pre-time skip arcs. Alabasta and Ennies Lobby would be incredible. I’m SUPER upset that Franky, the cyborg who literally runs on Cola, isn’t in the game yet. He is one of my soul animals. I don’t know how they managed to fit his monstrous post time skip frame into the game, but there it is right in the trailer. Just listen to this awesome jazzy theme. No other theme in the show sounds like this. I loop this song every single time I need to go to the market on a cola run. Anyway, There is an offline single player mode, which is appreciated. Once you get to Punk Hazard in the story, you’ll gain access to pirate alliances for more bonuses. The game itself is just OK, but the One Piece wrapping makes it quite enjoyable.

Sword Art Online. The other anime is Sword Art Online. I don’t care. Fight me.

From one perspective, it makes sense. Unlike the other games in the series, which use a variety of custom engines that may or may not work well on mobile, Blood Drive runs on an engine that mobile players are quite familiar with: the Unity engine. To tell the truth, this wasn’t a good choice for a Vita game. Unless the developer uses a lot of tricks, Unity runs pretty badly on the Vita. As a result, Blood Drive got a lot of criticism for technical issues like framerate drops and frequent, lengthy loading times. By contrast, Unity runs quite well on iOS, making those load times a lot shorter and the framerate drops virtually a non-issue. Simply put, this is the best version of Blood Drive yet, and it likely wasn’t nearly as troublesome to port as the original title.

From another perspective, this was a really bad idea. I’ve played the original Corpse Party to completion twice, but I had to go diving into Wikis to get my bearings in Blood Drive. There were a few games released between BloodCovered and Blood Drive, but the absence of an English version of one particular game on iOS makes this a real hassle. While all of the games spin around the ideas introduced in the first game, the most tightly connected games in terms of plot are those that make up the Heavenly Host story arc. Corpse Party: BloodCovered is the first part, and Blood Drive is the third part. What we’re missing is Corpse Party: Book of Shadows, the game that begins new threads on what was originally a one-off game, fleshes out the characters, and sets up Blood Drive‘s narrative. Imagine if you watched the first Pirates of the Caribbean, skipped the second, and tried to understand what the heck was going on in the third. You’ll eventually get your bearings, but for a game that leans so heavily on its plot, it’s weird to be missing so much important information and character development.

Adding to the confusion is that the game has adopted a new graphical style, replacing the retro-style sprites of the first game with… well, with retro-style low-poly 3D models. You still get distinctive 2D art for each character that displays when they speak, but when you’re just looking at the models on-screen, it can pretty tough to tell who is who. The style of graphics also looks a lot more adorable than the pixel art did. Don’t get me wrong, some horrific, screwed-up things happen in this game regularly. But seeing these big-headed blobs acting out these scenes greatly reduces the fear factor. It would almost be better if nothing at all was shown and your imagination did the work. A girl stabbing herself with a pair of scissors because she’s having a mental break-down is pretty intense, but it loses a lot of intensity when you watch a chibi 3D model trying to act it out by flailing her crudely-rendered stumpy hands. Ghosts and other things that are meant to scare you also come off less horrific than they do comedic. I know the developers were just trying to preserve the SD-style of the original game in 3D, but it isn’t nearly as effective for scaring the player.

All of that said, if you can get past that initial hump of confusion and try not to snicker too much at the unintentional comedy of flailing rejects from the Nintendo 64, Blood Drive is a pretty interesting game. It’s messed up in similar ways to the first game, and if you enjoyed the twisty tale that game told, you’ll probably like what you find here, too. As before, it’s something of a hybrid of an adventure game, survival horror, and a visual novel. You’ll have to explore locations solving light puzzles and avoiding dangers, trying to stretch out limited resources in order to stay alive. On the narrative side, there are multiple bad endings to uncover by failing in particular ways, and as in previous games, finding all of the odd ways you can die becomes a bit of a meta-game in and of itself.

Virtual buttons are used to move, interact with objects, run, switch between party members, and use your battery-powered flashlight. The game is broken up into multiple chapters, each featuring a particular mix of characters for you to control. Broadly speaking, your goal is to try to bring back the four friends you lost during the course of the first game. They were not only killed, but actually wiped out of existence, and only the surviving students seem to remember them. A chance meeting tips off a guilt-ridden Ayumi Shinozaki to a way of possibly correcting some of her past mistakes, and since she’s apparently never played one of these games before herself, she foolishly dives in danger, dragging her remaining friends along with her. Many of the familiar sights from the previous games are here, including the Heavenly Host school and series antagonist Sachiko. There are lots of new faces too, but I wouldn’t get too attached to most of them. You know how these stories go.

While the game is technically in a lot better shape than the Vita version, there are still quite a few loading screens to contend with. It’s also obvious the game was designed around a button interface, as certain actions can be a bit more complicated than they ought to be. The new characters aren’t terribly likable, and the overall plot isn’t nearly as strong as that of the first game, either. While it’s still good for some scares and chills, the feeling of dread isn’t nearly as strong in Blood Drive as it was in the first game. That’s probably as much to do with the new visual style as anything else, but whatever the reason, it does hurt the game’s appeal somewhat. The fact that iOS players don’t have easy access to the game that bridges the original story and this one is not ideal, either.

If you haven’t played the first game yet, I’d recommend going and doing that before you even consider this one. You will be utterly lost without it. After that, I’m not sure what to say. You could jump in on this admittedly good version of a decent sequel knowing that you’re going to have to sort out the confusion of the missing plot elements from Corpse Party: Book of Shadows and completely spoil the plot of that game should it ever come. Your other options are to either play Book of Shadows on another platform or wait for the English version to come to iOS. This is a fine version of Blood Drive, and with many of the technical problems plaguing the Vita version sorted out, it’s easy enough to recommend to Corpse Party fans, but 5pb sure didn’t do players any favors by releasing these games out of order.

Voyageur‘s main gameplay loop is traveling to a planet, loading up on supplies – so you can then travel to another planet – buy and sell all kinds of weird stuff at the market, and experience whatever the specific planet has to offer. These experiences come in the form of random encounters with smugglers, resistance fighters – there’s a light Star Wars-like vibe to the game’s politics – possible crew members or random travelers, and so on. You can also visit various locations like museums for instance or even go on expeditions. The basic loop becomes quite predictable after the first 15 or so planets; you’ll be buying various goods on one planet and then offloading them when you get a better deal a couple of planets later, buying sufficient supplies almost mechanically, and then picking a planet to visit from the list of 2 or 3 you get each time.

After a while, the planets start sounding the same – even their descriptions are almost identical to earlier ones – and while there is an overarching narrative that ties the universe together, Voyageur doesn’t ground your experience as much as it could have. The result is my eyes glazed over the planet descriptions quite often towards the latter stages of my voyages because I had visited similar planets in the past too often to feel surprised or intrigued. There are a ton of planets to visit, but more than once I felt I would have preferred fewer planets but ones that felt more distinct and more intriguing.

Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot to do in the game given that the world and story are procedurally generated. However, as games like No Man’s Sky have shown recently, procedural generation might offer quantity but doesn’t always offer quality. Since the text in Voyageur is procedurally generated – recombined parts of authored text – I find myself re-reading passages I’ve read before, and that feeling of familiarity clashed with the sense of discovery I expected from a one-way ticket to the center of the galaxy. I understand the reasons behind the decision to go with procedural generation when you are a small studio, but perhaps the game would have been better served with shorter playthroughs to help avoid the repetition.

Speaking of playthroughs, the game has a handful of different endings, and every time you “end" one playthrough, you start over again fortified with some of your previous experiences. I won’t spoil how the endings come about because discovering them is entertaining, but I will say that they take a while to encounter, which made me less interested in going back and starting all over again. The gameplay loop was a bit too similar for me to invest more time to it.

Despite my issues with the procedural generation part of Voyageur, players who like text-heavy games will find plenty of fun moments. As you travel across the galaxy, you gain knowledge that you can then share with others – usually for a profit. There’s also the resistance story to get involved in, and that’s quite fun initially, and a constant debate over political systems and the role of the individual in governance. All these are fun storylines, although, again, they do start feeling too similar later on. You’ll also often find stowaways that you’ll have to deal with or passengers that want a ride. So there’s plenty of fun moments to experience in Voyageur; you’ll just be experiencing them regularly.

You can also assemble a crew to help you with your travels, and each of them has a semblance of a personality. They’ll even get mad at you and even revolt if you’re doing one of the few things they hate. I wish, though, that they were more fleshed out because their cardboard-deep personality kept me from getting invested in their fates or reasoning; if one of them decided to flee, I really didn’t care much and I just went and found a replacement.

Visually, the game is as sparse as it gets, which is unsurprising in a piece of interactive fiction. The soundtrack is better than the visuals in terms of variety, and it does a nice job of keeping you company across your travels. The good thing is that the game plays fine on an iPhone despite the tons of text you have to read on the small screen.

Overall, Voyageur is an ambitious attempt at a procedurally generated sci-fi interactive fiction whose lengthy playthroughs end up hurting it rather than helping it. There’s plenty to explore and plenty to do, so it’s worth at least one trip down the galaxy; unfortunately, you might not feel like going through it again after it’s done.

You don’t need me to explain how golf works. OK Golf follows the basic rules of golf, though there’s no clubs, no wind, just you hitting the ball, trying to avoid hazards, and trying to get the ball in the hole in as few strokes as possible. The visual style of OK Golf is immediately striking, as it combines low-polygon visuals with vibrant colors for each of the four courses. Additionally, the courses take place in what can be best described as a sterile abyss, a construction in the middle of the void. It’s a lot like Hitman GO ($4.99) in style, but it looks rather cool for a golf game. Also, the low-poly style is used to help show where the hills and valleys of the holes are, to help you out with your myriad shots. The courses take place across several themes, and what’s clever is that each course holds a secret hole, hidden either in the design of the course, or even just outside the course. It’s a unique world of golfing.

You don’t have to worry about any power meters with OK Golf. You just pull back to aim your shot, with a line showing where the ball will go as well as the expected landing area (assuming any obstructions aren’t hit). You can pull back further to get a more powerful shot. These slingshot golf controls are a bit imperfect, though they are easy enough to use. I’ve pulled back and tried to aim, and had shots wind up not going where I’ve intended them to go. As well, there’s a shaking effect when using the power shot, and it’s just annoying to deal with. It feels just as likely that it’s a bug rather than a clever effect. In fact, the game has several odd bugs, such as all stars you earn on a hole temporarily getting added to your total, not just the new ones. For a game that was awarded an Apple Editor’s Choice, it feels a bit rough around the edges. Also, the lack of music makes the game feel like a rather spartan experience.

OK Golf works best as a golf game designed around being casual to play. Because of these slingshot controls, you can easily get into taking your shots and playing the game without having to learn how the game’s meters work. There’s no wind to deal with, it’s just about taking your shots and playing the game. For some, this will be the perfect golf game on mobile.

Yet, OK Golf feels rather weird for a golf game, though not in the outlandishly strange way. It’s just off-kilter enough that it seems weirder than if it was going for something wildly dissonant. Like, Golf Zero is weird for a golf game because most golf games don’t involve going through Super Meat Boy style levels to make slow-mo midair golf shots. So, the weirdness doesn’t seem so out of place because the game pronounces it. But OK Golf is ostensibly a more normal golf game. But, for example, putting isn’t affected by the terrain of the green. Why? It would make the game harder, but that seems inconsistent with the game’s logic, when in order to get birdies on some holes you have to get shots that bounce off the contours of the green.

Also, the weirdness extends to the structure of the game. Using a three-star system isn’t unusual, like in Super Stickman Golf 3 (Free) with its 9-hole courses. But the progression is centered around trying to get stars to unlock future courses. So, you’ll be trying to play holes again and again in order to rack up the stars to unlock future ones. With a bit of playtime and elbow grease, you’ll complete your task, but you will have to go for birdies or better on some of the holes in order to get enough stars for the fourth course to be unlocked. Golf competitions are not about just mastering individual holes, they’re about doing well on the entire course.

This odd structure unfortunately combines with the way shots work. You have a full power shot that you can use, but the problem is that its landing area is random and wider than normal shots. So, if you have to get the ball a long way away, you can’t count on it getting in the exact spot where you’re aiming. Some of the windows to get birdies are rather tight. It felt like sometimes I got birdies because my power shot lucked out by landing on the fairway or green in the shot area, instead of the rough. Hazards like the rough and sand traps are rather punishing because they cut your shot range down dramatically to a point where it can interfere too much with your strategy for taking on the hole. On an individual course, this isn’t necessarily a problem, but in championship mode, this can be a real issue. Combine the difficulty of scoring below par with having to maintain a good score on 9 holes in a row. Good luck!

There are two issues with championship mode, and its similar time trial mode. One is the difficulty, because the game is built around doing really well once. This is different from other golf games, and how the sport is competitively structured to begin with. Golf has a wide amount of variance, and that’s why the sport is centered around doing well across a variety of challenges, and consistent performance is rewarded. Playing 9 holes of OK Golf means tackling 9 different challenges where you have to take great risks each time in order to do well. It just doesn’t work out that well in this context.

What does work well is the time trial mode. It has you completing all 9 holes of a course as quickly as possible. This provides a brand new context for the courses that rewards quick execution, and may even have you exploring new avenues with shots that are designed to get to the hole more quickly than you would otherwise attempt. It’s a cool mode to play around with because it throws any pretense of caution out of the window, and puts you into this zone where you’re not thinking about every single move you do, you’re focused on the overall time goal. It’s a lot of fun to play around with.

I find myself incredibly conflicted about OK Golf. There’s a lot of cool things about it, but there’s just some aspects to the game that other golf games have already gotten right, and there was no reason for OK Golf to go around messing with the golf formula. I’m interested to see what future content and updates bring to improve and diversify the golfing experience here, because there is a great game somewhere in here with some fixes. Until then, I have to say OK Golf is just…okay.

Visually, Felis reminds me of games such as Leo’s Adventure, which means that it looks lovely. Each locale has a hand-drawn look that goes very well with the general fantastical theme of the world. There’s also a decent amount of variety in terms of the game’s missions as well, which allow the art style to really shine. Of course, the kittens you save themselves are absolutely adorable, with meows that got even my own cats intrigued with the game. The great art style also translates to the games enemies, which, as you might imagine, are mostly variations on the cat’s worst enemy: the rat. Whether it’s regular rats, knight rats, grizzly bear rats or undead rats, Felis has plenty of rodents to take out as you search for the abducted kitties.

Finding, and more importantly saving, those cats make up the extent of the gameplay in Felis and the game actually has a few small tricks up its sleeve to make it interesting. For starters, saved kittens will typically follow you around Lemmings style, which would be great if not for all the pitfalls littered around each mission. So, a lot of the strategy involves saving kittens, making sure they don’t cause their own doom by instructing them to stay put, and clearing the path ahead of various enemies. See a pitfall ahead of you? Well, then you’ll need to tell each cat to not move, and manually carry each one over the hazard before putting them down and telling them to not move. Missions typically build upon saving and keeping the cats alive as you’ll encounter puzzles that need you to use the cats to access new locales (which typically then give you even more cats). Of course, the game keeps track of all the cats saved in each mission and players are rewarded for saving all the cats. It’s a basic gameplay system, but it works well within the game.

I also enjoyed the game’s combat, which again was pretty simple but implemented well. Different enemies require different strategies to dispatch (although you can brute force most of them if you wanted to). Melee and projectile attacks add to the mix and a basic inventory system lets you store items such as potions in case your health runs low. While the combat system doesn’t offer anything innovative, I would have been perfectly satisfied with what Felis offered if not for the lackluster controls.

Unfortunately, the great visuals and decent gameplay can’t overcome the sub-par previously alluded to controls. Players move the hero around on a persistent too-tiny D-Pad that simply doesn’t work well. When you combine that with the also unnecessarily small action buttons Felis is rife for frustrating deaths during the game’s platforming segments. The D-Pad issues are particularly frustrating because a lot of the platforming strategy involves putting your saved kitties into a holding pattern (which requires you to hold down on the D-Pad while you release the cat with an action button. If your finger is precisely on the ‘down’ position you can potentially kill your cats with an errant throw, potentially messing up an entire run.

The controls issues continue with some frustrating collision control. Early on you encounter things such as thorny bushes which will cause significant damage if you don’t jump over them. The problem is the hit detection doesn’t quite much up with the artwork of the bushes themselves. So, while you might think you need to start your jump before you encounter the bushes, you actually need to touch them in order to jump over the portion of the bushes that actually counts as damage. Can you learn to deal with this? Of course, but it’s a silly issue that shouldn’t be there to begin with.

The collision control isn’t a huge issue, but the general poor implementation of the controls simply makes Felis: Save all the Cats far less fun than it could be. It’s really a shame too, because the world is interesting, the cats are adorable, and everything else about the game would be pretty enjoyable. However, in its current state, Felis ends up being a flawed product that might be worth it for cat lovers (because really, we buy anything with cats), but may not be worth it for everyone else.

In Gridland, you start with a grid of symbols representing a few different resources. Swap tiles to make matches, and your character will start building things. As you construct and upgrade your village, new resources will become available on the grid, giving you access to even more buildings and upgrades. Of course, the more different kinds of symbols you have in play, the harder it is to make combos with each match. Getting the most out of each move becomes quite important as you work your way through the game, as every move pushes time forward a little bit. When the sun sets, the grid changes. The symbols become swords, shields, monster lairs, and more. Matching lairs will bring out a monster that you’ll have to fight and kill. The swords and shields are the tools you’ll need to do that job. The monsters aren’t shy about hitting back, though, and if you run out of hit points, you’ll be sent back to the beginning of the day.

At night, time passes when you match a monster lair. You pretty much have to keep pressing on if you want to see the sun rise again and the safety that it brings. Enemies will sometimes drop useful items that you can fire off at any time. Managing these items is one of the keys to surviving in the long run, along with judicious use of your limited magic abilities. Killing monsters earns you experience points which you use to level up, extending your life bar. Your equipment improves as you uncover new resources, but you’ll also end up unearthing a mess of new monsters along the way, too. You have to be careful to keep things in tight balance lest you bring out the real nasties before you have the means to cope with them. Even with things in balance, you have to be very careful not to spawn too many enemies at once unless you’re holding onto an ace of some kind.

The detail that makes this all work as well as it does is that when day turns to night, each piece will reliably turn into a corresponding night piece. You need to harvest materials to grow your town, but you don’t want to leave yourself without any swords and shields for the night. Harvesting certain materials might do nothing for you at the moment, but they’ll become dangerous creatures at night, so you spend a precious move matching them to mitigate risks. Big combos are great during the day, but at night, a single reckless cascade can end your life. Essentially, what’s good for the grid during the day isn’t always good during the night. It’s vital that you watch the sun carefully and prepare things a little before it sets.

It’s a nice contrast. You’ll spend the day making matches near the bottom of the board, trying to set up big combos, and generally going about things in a safe, carefree way. The nights force you to play in almost the opposite fashion. You have to take each move carefully, planning ahead for swords and shields to replace whatever you’re currently wielding when they break. You’ll hang near the top of the board, trying to set off enemies at a slow pace. You’ll watch that moon like a hawk, not because you need to prepare for what comes next, but because of the relief that comes from surviving the night. The game saves at the beginning of each day, and you can try over from there as many times as you like. You just have to survive the night. Just a few more moves without anything going wrong.

Gridland has something of an end state, but it will let you keep on going after that if you’d like. You can also do a New Game+ where you keep your level but otherwise start from scratch. Unfortunately, replayability isn’t one of the game’s strong points. The whole thing becomes routine alarmingly quickly, and it’s possible you’ll be bored pulling off the same old strategies even before you get to the end. Super Gridland offers up some extra difficulty settings to try to give you a reason to play it more than once, at least. The problem is that as you go along, the enemies move in fairly tight lock-step with your character’s advancements. It never really feels like you’re going anywhere as a result. It’s absolutely worth it to stick it out to the end, because it’s quite cool. Beyond that, it’s hard to imagine going back to this game all that often.

Super Gridland features more colorful, detailed graphics than the browser version, along with new music. To tell the truth, I kind of preferred the simpler visuals of the browser version, but the new music is pretty catchy. Both of those are going to come down to your individual tastes, though. I feel like the new UI makes it a little hard to see where your resources are at if you’re playing on an iPhone, which isn’t so great. Apart from that, there’s the aforementioned difficulty setting, some sound options, three save files, and upon clearing the game, a New Game+ mode. You’ll also get to see a number of interesting stats when you finish the game, giving you a target to try to beat on subsequent plays, if nothing else. No leaderboards, Game Center or otherwise, unfortunately. It’s also worth mentioning that the game doesn’t offer a lot of guidance, so if you’re the sort that wants or needs it, you should probably stop by the thread in the TouchArcade forums.

While some might prefer the new aesthetics and a stand-alone version of an app does have merits in and of itself, it’s hard to make a strong case for buying Super Gridland over simply playing the browser version on those qualities alone. I choose to look at this as an opportunity to pay Townsend for the fun I had with the browser version of Gridland, with Super Gridland serving as something of a bonus. You’ll certainly get your value out of the money spent, even if it doesn’t offer quite the same impact or replay value as some other games in the genre on iOS.

Empire of Angels 4 only has a couple of gimmicks to call its own. First, almost all of the important characters in the story are well-endowed, cute girls in somewhat skimpy outfits. Second, if any of these characters are defeated in combat, they’ll be reduced to their underwear for a couple of seconds before retreating. Since the battles are rendered in a super-deformed style, this is basically played for laughs rather than any sort of titillation. Well, it’s lasted this long, so I guess these things are working well enough for the series. I’m pretty sure this is Empire of Angels‘ debut on iOS, as this is a port of the latest PC release that you can pick up off of Steam. It’s certainly the only one available in English on iOS, at least.

Don’t worry too much that you might have missed out on the story by not playing the earlier ones, though. It’s a pretty standard fantasy RPG tale, is relatively self-contained, and has a somewhat questionable translation on top of all of that. In short, it’s not really worth focusing too hard on the story. You’ve got your usual mix of character types, all the way down to mysterious magical girl who falls from the sky and shy girl with glasses who always gets lost. Their banter can be funny sometimes, if nothing else. Granted, I think that’s only intentional some of the time.

Characters will join your group set as a certain job class. As you play through the game, you’ll be able to advance them in those classes to make them more powerful and earn new abilities. You can also switch them over to another job if you feel like doing that, but it’s not advisable. Unlocking the ultimate rank of each job requires a great deal of dedication as it is, since you’ll have to get a top rank on most missions and flag all the proper events. You don’t really have to do this, though. The game is quite easy if all you want to do is plow through the story. Each map has some additional objectives for those seeking a challenge, and you’ll need to clear those if you want to fully unlock the power of your team.

That’s really all there is to the character development. There’s no gear or anything like that to find and equip. The strength of each character is entirely determined by their job and level. Even if a character is forced to retreat from battle due to running out of HP, they’ll receive just as many experience points at the end, so you don’t even have to worry about keeping everyone alive unless that’s one of the mission objectives. The optional objectives will test you, though. The maps aren’t very big most of the time, but that makes achieving certain goals even harder. The game also loves to put chests in places that are hard to reach without wiping out all of the enemies and finishing the map, so you’ll have to learn how to herd the baddies if you want to pick those up.

In battle, it’s the same old thing we’ve seen many times. The maps are divided into grid squares. You and the computer take turns moving your entire squad, with each unit being able to move a certain number of squares and perform one action per turn. Using special abilities requires a certain number of action points. Those points restore with each turn, but between that requirement and the cooldown on certain moves, you won’t be able to spam your best abilities non-stop. The enemies have a good variety of attacks to keep you on your toes. Bunch too many units together and the computer will cackle as it rains down an attack that hits several adjacent squares. Separate your units too much and you’ll find them surrounded. It’s not too hard to cow the opponent around, but carelessness can still run you into trouble, particularly if you’re underleveled.

The port from the PC version is a good one. The controls work out pretty well, though they’ve essentially just replaced mouse commands with taps. The game looks quite good and runs smoothly, and I can’t deny there’s a certain charm to the stylized characters and their animations. The first time you see an archer launch an arrow tipped with a suction cup, you can’t help but smile. The big heads allow the characters to show expressions, and though they don’t have the widest range, it’s still pretty amusing. The still artwork used for cut-scenes is good, but it would be nice if there were a little bit more unique art and less of the proverbial talking heads. There’s a lot of voice acting, but it’s all in Chinese, so unless you understand the language, you might not get much out of it. Sadly, that voice acting is probably the reason why the game installs at more than 2 GB. Oh, and fair warning: Empire of Angels 4 sucks battery power a little faster than you might expect it to.

Empire of Angels 4 is a decent enough game, if not terribly exciting. A better localization might have even made this a really good game. It’s quite long, and I’d imagine trying to do everything could easily take a person over 30 hours. The biggest problems it has apart from its blandness is that it’s a bit too easy and seems to be counting on the generic, badly-translated narrative to keep the player’s interest over the long haul. Still, with impressive production values and reasonably solid gameplay, this one might find fans among those who can’t get enough of this genre. I can at least say it’s the first game I’ve played in a while that let me hit someone so hard that their trousers fell off. That’s got to count for something.

This is an action-physics game where you play as Zoe and Baxter, who are each equipped with gravity guns that can pick up objects and enemies, and launch them in order to achieve various tasks. You’ll pick up batteries and shoot them into their proper receptacles. Crates will be stacked on top of one another to form staircases. Enemies can be defeated by launching themselves at each other or at walls. Baxter has the ability to blow stuff up, though this is used more as a story-specific ability rather than as a core gameplay element. You also have optional items to find, which can be found behind hidden switches, in boxes, and in secret areas.

The core part of the fun in Island Delta is playing around with the gravity gun. Picking up an enemy and sending them to a blunt force trauma demise is entertaining, as is using robots to blow up other robots. Manipulating the world feels really cool, in a way that I wish more games did so. It’s because it makes the player feel like they’re solving their own problems, utilizing the environment to their advantage. And there are clever moments that feel ad-hoc, like using random objects as shields to protect you from turrets that try to shoot you. Or when a walking robot shoots a shot at you, but it moves slowly enough that you can pick them up and pull them into the shot, that kills them. These are the strongest parts of the Island Delta experience, and prove why there need to be more of these physics-manipulation action games.

Not all is well on Island Delta, though. The puzzles include a few odd moments, to say the least. One level has you trying to reach a higher platform that’s accessible only by stacking boxes to form a path upward, something you do earlier in the game. Except that it’s on a conveyor belt, so building it in the standard way of putting one crate next to two crates on top of each other is nigh-impossible. My solution? Get one box half on another, and use that to climb upward. It feels awkward, and the game occasionally throws situations that don’t feel clever or designed, they feel like you accidentally discovered how to solve them.

Also, this is not a game that needed combat at all. Or at least, it needs to keep combat separate from the puzzles entirely. Trying to solve that aforementioned conveyor belt/block puzzle is tricky enough. It’s even more difficult when there’s a robot that spawns every few seconds that distracts you from your objective. The game keeps throwing situations that are tough to deal with, but only get more difficult because of the need to deal with enemies while you’re trying to dodge dangerous hazards and manipulate various objects. For example, level 2-8 has you dealing with a giant Tesla coil that charges up and does a ton of damage, while trying to collect boxes and launch them at switches around the arena. That would be tricky enough as you have to be in the danger area to fit the boxes in the switches’ area, but then you have to deal with two different types of robots that spawn, and a cannon in one corner of the room that shoots bombs at you. It’s a lot to deal with, and it’s just annoying to deal with every single one of these hazards combined.

I’m not entirely opposed to combat in Island Delta, because there’s some cool moments. Picking up and throwing someone will never not get old. Launching a robot at a wall? Priceless. But it’s more interesting when it’s not while I’m trying to do something else. If this was a game that committed to just being about infiltrating an enemy base, and using your gravity gun and character abilities to solve puzzles and find clever solutions to win, I think Island Delta would be much better.

The controls are asked to do more than they should be asked to do. Trying to manage fending off enemies while solving puzzles is a tough task when you have to use one hand to move with a virtual joystick, and then the other hand has to serve as a pointer finger to launch objects. Trying to build makeshift structures is difficult because you can’t control the vertical angle of your launches. So, building box structures is particularly annoying because you have to really get your positioning correct to make sure you aren’t putting too much forward velocity on your box launches. And even just placing something down on top of something else is difficult to do. This could be a much more intuitive game but it really isn’t.

Island Delta thus winds up being one of those games where the experience oscillates wildly between two extremes. The core idea is really good, and there’s fun to be had with it. But the actual execution leaves something to be missed. The combat is entirely mismanaged. The design shows a lot of good ideas, but having to deal with enemies shooting at you the whole time that you’re trying to solve the puzzles is absolutely suboptimal. Island Delta will entertain and impress at times, but then sometimes it will just throw things at you that just feel unnecessary. Gravity guns are still fun to play with, but they alone won’t make a game fun. Still, Island Delta has enough going for it that it’s not worth losing the forest for the trees, because there really are some cool moments between the frustrating ones.

You play as the child of a chieftain. Your tribe is one of the strongest in the Northern Steppe, but you soon end up on the run from a more powerful foe. The Tribe of the Black Wolf have been sweeping up from the south, subduing every other tribe they come across. Their leader, the dark shaman Zhan-Ukhel, sees you as a threat to his power, but why? No longer safe in your previous home, your whole tribe must begin a pilgrimage to a land seen only in a vision from the gods: the Valley of the North Wind. Just getting there is hard enough. None of the tribes have ever ventured so far north. But you must also mind the threats snapping at your heels from the Black Wolf tribe, to say nothing of potential dangers from within. When the leadership of the tribe falls to you, you’ll have to decide what kind of leader you’re going to be.

So, exciting premise, but does it pay off? Kind of. You will indeed get at least one exciting tale out of all of this. Other than one fairly big moment that I couldn’t buy, the story was interesting and well-written all the way through. But there’s more to a gamebook than just having a good story, and it’s in those other respects where Saga of the North Wind stumbles a bit. There are some moments where you have to make blind choices, which is one of the most frustrating mechanics to put in a choice-based fiction game. If you’re only going to give me a choice of directions without any indications what separates them, you might as well just flip a coin. It feels like I’m having my agency taken away, and while that can be used as an effective story-telling tool, here it just sticks out as a bizarre random element.

There are other times where you can spot the game part of the gamebook at work, too. You get railroaded more than a few times along your journey, and the writing doesn’t always handle things in a smooth and believable way if you choose in a direction other than the obviously intended one. A good gamebook should make me feel like going back and playing again to see what choosing differently would accomplish, but it was clear in Saga of the North Wind that the author had a plan and you were going to stick to it whether you liked it or not. Replaying the game more or less confirmed that suspicion. While I dug out some slight variances in the endings, getting any dramatically different outcomes took a lot more work than you would expect. You’ll have to be making the correct choices the whole way through to have a good shot at anything other than the default ending.

Again, that’s not necessarily a problem, but the game makes it seem like you have bigger choices than you do, only to almost immediately reinforce that your choice never mattered at all. Success or failure in certain situations relies on your statistics, but the game doesn’t make it clear enough most of the time as to which stats line up with which choices. Even failure tends to roll you along the main story path, however, so I suppose it doesn’t matter that much. The one place where the stats had an obvious effect on the story also created the most implausible situation for me in my entire time with the game. At one point, someone in your tribe betrays you. The game seems to pick the character who you have the worst relationship with, but in my first playthrough, that character was someone who gave zero prior indication that they were capable of such dastardly deeds.

The romance option also felt quite awkward. Like several other ChoiceScript games, the romance takes a backseat to the story for the most part. You’ll have locked into your only potential partner for each story well before you realize that it’s going down the romance road. So while you can, as per usual, choose your gender and sexual orientation, it’s very likely that you’ll get stuck with an incompatible partner as your only possible choice. It’s not a huge deal, but it is something of a bummer, since you’re obviously meant to find comfort with that person at the point in the story that it comes up. The relationships between characters in general aren’t particularly believable or handled all that well in Saga of the North Wind, so I suppose this was just one more brick in the wall on that end.

That all being said, the overall plot is worth reading, and for the most part, the text is quite readable. Some of the action scenes were especially strong, and the author has a strong talent for describing locations in a way that makes them come alive. There were also a few interesting game mechanics. At one point in the game, you are forced to take part in a series of fights with a small group under your command. You need to choose which fighters join each round and which sit out. The battles themselves are a game of rock-paper-scissors with the three different types of weapons, so ideally, you’ll want to match fighters with weapon advantages against the enemies. But those fighters can also be injured, and if you send them into another battle wounded, they may well die. You can try to tend to their wounds between battles, but doing so costs you time that could be spent training the rest of the group to make them more proficient with their weapons. This was a fun mini-game, albeit a regrettably brief one.

You also need to mind your provisions and resources, take care of your tribe’s numbers, and do your best to maintain the favor of the gods, lest you need to call on them in moments of despair. You’ll actually probably be calling on them a lot. They should hook you up with a family plan or something. There’s an additional mini-game called Crown and Ring if you should find time in your chieftain’s schedule to play it. Although your choices and accomplishments don’t carry a lot of narrative weight, it’s at least fun trying to chase down all of the achievements. There’s quite a robust selection of them, and they will require you to explore branches you might otherwise ignore. I’m not sure if it’s worth replaying a largely-similar story to get them all, but hey, if you like them, here they are.

I had a decent enough time on my first run through Saga of the North Wind, and chances are that if you are at least interested in the basic story set-up, you will too. It was only on subsequent playthroughs that the small cracks I spotted on my initial play broke wide open, dampening my enthusiasm for the game on the whole. If you don’t usually replay gamebooks, you’ll probably enjoy the Saga of the North Wind for its epic plot and flavorful text. On the other hand, if you’re the sort that likes to get all of the endings and keep playing to see where all the choices take you, Saga of the North Wind may well leave you feeling as weary as the travelers in the story itself.

All of that leads to expectations, and those can be tricky things to manage. For most, it would be impossible to live up to those twin spires of hype and history, but if anyone could pull it off, it would be Nintendo. I wish I could tell you that they did it. I would rather be writing a completely beaming review of one of the finest games to grace the app store, a game that through sheer quality justifies all of its hoops and irregularities relative to the rest of the App Store. I love Mario. But that’s not the review I’m writing today. Today, I’m writing about a pretty decent runner, polished to a shine, that just happens to feature one of gaming’s most famous icons. For many, that’s probably going to be enough to merit picking up Super Mario Run, but I can’t help but think this could have been better.

Super Mario Run is a stage-based auto-runner that sees the plumber doing his usual bit to rescue Princess Peach from King Koopa. The game includes three modes and gives you a fairly small slice of each for free before asking you to pay a single IAP to unlock the remainder. The mode that will likely be of immediate interest to most players is the Tour Mode. Here, you’ll run and jump your way through 24 stages spread across 6 worlds. I use ‘worlds’ simply in the grouping sense here, as unlike other Mario games, there’s no real theme to each world. Each stage takes a couple of minutes to clear, which makes for a fairly short game on initial playthrough. Collecting all of the special coins in a stage will unlock another set of coins along with some new enemy arrangements, and if you manage to snag all of those, there’s one more set waiting for you. Figuring out how to reach all of the coins and executing the necessary maneuvers helps extend this mode past the one or two hours it’ll take to rescue Peach.

Making your way to the somewhat anti-climactic final battle with Koopa isn’t too difficult. The game is quite forgiving for those who just want to make their way through. Not only can you collect Super Mushrooms to buffer our hero against a hit, you also get Bubbles to help you come back from what would otherwise be a lost life. If you take a fatal hit or plummet down a hole, Mario will bubble up and start moving backwards through the stage, allowing you to drop down wherever you feel most comfortable. This effectively gives you three chances per stage on top of any Super Mushrooms you might collect. You also have unlimited lives in the classical sense. Failing when you run out of bubbles forces you to start the stage from scratch, but there’s no running count of lives or anything like that. You can try as many times as you need to. The challenge is largely built into the coin hunts, which do a good job of catering to more skilled players.

Once you’ve gained your satisfaction from Tour Mode, you’ll probably want to check out the other two modes. The Kingdom Mode lets you build your own Mushroom Kingdom by placing buildings and decorations in fixed locations on the map. Some of these buildings give you special bonuses every so often when you tap them. These include a variety of mini-games, free Rally Tickets, and so on. A few very special buildings will unlock new characters to play as. You’ll have to pay for these buildings with the coins you’ve collected in other modes, but the prices are quite fair relative to what you’ll be bringing in. But coins aren’t enough on their own for most of these trinkets. You’ll also need a particular number of each color of Toad among your population. This is where we get to the bit that’s meant to last you a while, I think.

The third mode is the Toad Rally. In Toad Rally, you’ll play against another player’s ghost in timed stages built from looped sections of stages from the Tour Mode. Collecting coins is the top priority here, though there are lots of ways to add big bank to your total. You’ll want to keep an especially careful eye open for Super Stars, as if your opponent grabs one and you don’t, you’ve basically already lost. Performing stylish moves will attract Toads to cheer you on. They’ll contribute to your total when the scores are tallied as well. If you win, you’ll gain a bunch of Toads for your Kingdom, with the colors depending on the stage you challenged. If you lose, well, you’ll lose some of your Toads. It’s kind of a crummy feeling to lose, especially since a streak of losses can really set you back on your road to unlocking things.

To make matters worse, playing the Toad Rally requires a Rally Ticket. The game hands them out like candy initially, but once you’ve exhausted that finite supply, you’ll have to rely on the daily trickle the game gives you. Backsliding on progress feels bad, but it’s even worse when you can’t even try to make things right until the next day. Combined with the slow Toad gains from winning and the high populations required for many buildings and decorations, this starts to feel like a nasty grind. Worse, it’s the kind of grind where you can easily slip and end up not moving forward in any meaningful sense for days. You can get more tickets by trading My Nintendo coins, but in a manner of speaking, those coins are also limited in terms of how often you can earn them.

The Toad Rally mode also shows the ugly side of the game’s mechanics. Unlike the tightly-designed Tour Mode levels, Toad Rally stages can sometimes get a little chaotic in how they’re stitched together. When every path, every bounce, every potential wall kick isn’t accounted for by a level designer, the curious collision detection unique to Super Mario Run can get unreliable in a hurry. There will be times where you were sure you bopped an enemy on its head, only to take damage. Even more confusing, however, are the times when you’ll barrel right into an enemy’s face and somehow take him out without a scratch. This is all tied into the new way Mario interacts with his enemies, but when tons of objects are flying around on the screen, it can be hard to make sense of it.

This is probably as good a place as any to talk about the controls. As promised, this is a Mario game you can play with one hand. That revelation isn’t all that remarkable for those of us who have been mobile gaming for a while, but it is something new for the character. Even in the few auto-running instances he’s been in before, such as special levels in New Super Mario Bros. games or the amusing hacks of the NES Remix games, Mario has never had to cope with only a single input. So, obviously, they went with jumping when you touch. Short touch gets a short jump. Long touch gets a high one. Touching again while Mario is in the air does his little waggle-pirouette that was introduced in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Jump into a wall and Mario will skid along it, with another touch launching him off into his usual wall-kick. These are all sensible choices.

Mario’s got a new move, though, and I don’t think it’s a good one. In other Mario games, Mario is only able to safely contact an active enemy from the top. In Super Mario Run, he can run headlong into some enemies and simply do a little flip over them. To jump off of them, you need to touch the screen as he scrambles over the enemy. Note that I said some enemies. This doesn’t work with every enemy. The rule seems to be that if it was okay to head-bop them in the other games, you’re okay to run into them here. It’s an odd extra step in the whole process that will surely mess with many veteran Mario players. It’s also the most likely source of the funky collision detection. I can only guess that Nintendo did this to make the game more forgiving, but I can’t help but feel the game would have been just fine using the usual Mario jumping rules.

There are also plenty of new elements to help facilitate the auto-running gameplay. Blocks on the ground will allow you to stop, move quickly, or flip backwards. It’s a pretty neat idea and vital for preserving certain traditions from the other Mario games, such as timing your run through curtains of Podoboos. It’s essential for bringing in the now-customary battle with Koopa, where you need to go over or under him to reach the axe and chop the bridge from under his feet. I think they have exciting potential for auto-runner level designs, too. But at least in the game as it stands, it never really does much exciting with them. You’re going to need to master them to get all of the coins, but one could imagine a lot of interesting applications that the game never seems to get around to. The level design in general feels kind of toothless and anti-climactic in its difficulty curve. They’re carefully laid out, to be sure, but until you start hunting black coins, it feels like the game is afraid to lay into the player at all.

In trying to evaluate this game fairly, I’m forcing myself to do a little thought exercise. If this weren’t Mario, if this weren’t Nintendo, if this didn’t have all the hype, expectations, and nostalgia behind it, what would I think of this game? If I do that, all I can say is that the game is fine. It’s well-polished, the controls are responsive enough, and the level designs are acceptable. But it also feels quite lean in terms of content, and insubstantial on the whole. That’s the last place a paid auto-runner wants to find itself in, especially on iOS. There are so many fantastic runners on mobile, that if we were to separate this one from its brand, it probably wouldn’t even be poking its head into the upper tier of quality. That’s not even counting the twin elephants of the relatively high price tag or required online connection sitting over there in the corner, both of which could be seen as reasonable deal-breakers for some players.

Super Mario Run is a decent game. It accomplishes the fairly difficult goal of feeling like a proper Mario game while also bowing to some of the trends of mobile gaming. But with the likes of Rayman Fiesta Run ($2.99), Wind-Up Knight 2 (Free), Punch Quest (Free), and countless others competing at a high level in this genre, decent isn’t really good enough. A grindy town-builder isn’t exciting enough. A couple of hours of fun with only coin-hunting to keep you busy afterwards isn’t substantial enough. If you want Mario on your iPhone, Super Mario Run does its best to approximate the trappings. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a top-shelf auto-runner to play, it’s-a not him.

As a game, My Horse Prince can best be described as an idle time-waster. The gameplay, such as it is, largely involves tapping on objects to fill a meter at the top of the screen. When the meter is filled, you’ll earn the next story segment, bringing you to a new area with another type of object you need to tap. Naturally, the meter gets larger as you go, spreading the story segments out over a larger span of time. You also have to mind the Horse Prince’s stamina, as each object collected will deplete his energy and reduce the number of points earned towards the meter. His stamina will recover with time, but you can give it a little boost by initiating conversations with him and correctly answering his questions. These too are on a timer, so you can only answer three questions before having to wait a set period of time or watching an advertisement. Oh, and if you choose a bad answer, the Prince will lose stamina, an outcome you can reverse by watching a video ad.

That’s basically it as far as the mechanics go. There are IAP items that double your points intake or give you a temporary fever mode where Horse Prince Yuuma can earn tons of points in a short span of time. You can also pay to remove all of the non-incentivized ads, in particular the banners at the bottom of the screen and the ads that show during story intermissions. But whatever you decide, the game largely amounts to opening it up now and then, tapping stuff until you’ve used up all of Yuuma’s stamina and your three questions, watching a story scene if you happen to fill the meter that time, and then putting it away until you remember it again later.

So what’s the pull here? Why isn’t this one star? Well, it comes down to the writing and the game’s idiotic sense of humor. My Horse Prince tells the story of a young woman who you can name, but is called Umako by default. She’s just quit her job because she’s looking for a boyfriend and there weren’t any decent guys at her company. Her search has taken her to a ranch, where she hopes to meet a good-looking man. Instead, she meets a race horse named Yuuma, whose head inexplicably appears to be that of an attractive young man. The ranch’s owner gives a somewhat nonsensical explanation for why she sees a sexy guy when everyone else just sees an ordinary horse, but you shouldn’t worry too much about that. The owner informs Umako that Yuuma has no owner, and thus will be “retired" the next day. Umako is persuaded to take him on, and thus the roller coaster begins.

Each area has its own premise that is set up by a joke-filled dialogue between Umako, Yuuma, and some variation of the owner Ojisan, with a couple of surprising other characters appearing if you get far enough in the game. The first stage has a reasonable enough set-up. Carrots appear around Yuuma’s pen, and you’ll have to tap them to direct him to come over and eat them. He eats them with zest, and it’s pretty funny watching his human head devour them. You even get different animations based on how tired Yuuma is. Fill the meter, though, and you’ll get your first sign of where this game is going. Er, besides the handsome man’s head on the horse’s body, that is.

Just as in a visual novel, when you reach a certain target, you get a nice still frame of beautiful artwork. As in many romance novels, these frames depict our heroine and her love interest in the various stages of their relationship. After his belly is full of carrots, Yuuma stomps his way over to Umako in a cloud of dust, falling forward to create the first captured moment: Umako, her back to the wall, with Yuuma’s hoof pressed against the wall behind her head. In Japan, this is called the kabe-don (wall-thump), and it’s one of the basic tropes of Japanese romance fiction. Of course, it’s not usually done between a horse with a man’s head and a human woman, and it looks as awkward as it sounds. The artwork seems utterly sincere, but even the game pokes fun at itself in the script about this sort of thing.

Business picks up even more when you reach the second day. Having found an owner, it’s now time for Yuuma to get back to training for his upcoming races. How do you train a horse for racing? If you guessed “disposable treadmills", what the heck? Are you psychic or just harmoniously weird? Yes, the object that you have to tap this time is a regular old human treadmill, which Yuuma leaps on and takes a short dash on before destroying it, again with a few different flavors of animation. This is where the game starts to play with visual absurdity full-time, stretching and distorting Yuuma’s frame to make him do weird things like propping his front hooves on the hand rails while running with his hind legs. All the while, Umako and Ojisan will have idiotic conversations at the bottom of the screen.

Further adventures will take you to a kitchen, the racetrack, the streets of Tokyo, a concert, and even heaven itself, and things only get stranger as you go. My Horse Prince mostly maintains a tone of complete foolishness and self-deprecation, but it flashes sincerity just frequently enough to keep the whole thing glued together. Each chapter opens and closes with a theater frame, driving home that the whole thing is supposed to be a bizarre fiction. Ojisan acts as the head usher, hyping up the next episode, while Yuuma runs a broom across the floor in the seats of the foreground. The story, such as it is, often zigs and zags in illogical directions, something the characters aren’t afraid to point out.

In spite of how silly it all is, you might just find yourself rooting for Umako and Yuuma regardless of the obvious problems with that outcome. There’s no real ending to the game, though, since it just seems to continue on as the developer adds more chapters. So you’ll just have to settle for the push and pull of episodic romance, with no escape hatch too small for the plot to dive through. It’s fine, though. You wouldn’t to really take this seriously, would you? Look at the man-horse. Stop. This is a joke.

I played the Japanese version of this game for quite a while, and when I heard it had an English release, I was a little worried. The Japanese version’s text is just about perfect in tone and humor, and a great deal of it is steeped in pop culture references that wouldn’t work outside of Japan. Fortunately, My Horse Prince appears to have received a surprisingly strong localization. It preserves what it can, goes in different directions where it has to, and is very readable. It was clearly handled by a native English speaker, and I’m happy for that because virtually every strength this game has beyond its bizarre premise comes from its writing quality. It’s not perfect, mind you. There are awkward bits here and there, and some of the question and answer sections are hard to suss out with the existing translations, but overall, it’s quite good.

My Horse Prince is a hard game to score, though. If you’ve got the right sense of humor, it’s a must-play. If you’re a fan of Japanese visual novels and are open to seeing the genre’s tropes skewered, you really need to try My Horse Prince. But the gameplay is almost entirely empty, the story intentionally goes nowhere, and there are a ton of free-to-play monetization elements that pop up, often in annoying ways. So I’m going to settle for this: if you are at all intrigued by the premise and its promise for shenanigans, give the game a try at least until the second day. If this whole thing looks stupid, creepy, or too weird for you? It probably is. I kind of love this game, albeit for reasons that have nothing to do with the game part of the thing, but I also know that my feelings are not likely to be shared by many or most. Ah, whatever, let’s just Carter it.

The objective of Party Hard Go is to kill everyone in the level. They’re partying, they’re being loud, you hate that, so you’re taking extreme measures to do so. Stealth is a tenet of the game, where you want to make sure your murders aren’t seen by other people. Carrying dead bodies around will arouse suspicions and get the cops chasing you Benny Hill-style, so throw them in dumpsters, off of the roof, or into the wood chipper. Various traps will also help out, such as blowing up speakers, poisoning the punch bowl, and starting a car to run over a bunch of people. There are levels with fixed layouts, but some traps and elements such as people you can call in to the party to help with the mayhem, are randomized.

The best and most frustrating part about Party Hard Go is the way that randomness plays a role. Get stuck on a tough level? Well, maybe this randomized round will net you a zombie outbreak. One round might spawn a car in the right place this round. The different varying elements mean that sometimes you’ll succeed because of a certain trap will be available to you that can take out a lot of people. The phone calls that bring in the exterminators spraying the bug poison are a particularly useful tool. One forest level has a buzzsaw that is handy for taking out anyone that steps near it, picking up sleepers to their doom, or taking out dead bodies. Interestingly, carrying a sleeping person isn’t necessarily fishy (unless they wake up and knock you around for carrying them), but people will freak out if they see you carrying a dead body. You have to decide when it’s the right point to start the indiscriminate murdering by thinning out the herd of potential witnesses that could call the cops.

Escaping the cops or taking them out is extremely difficult, and requires luck or good timing with triggering traps on them. Later forms of law enforcement will prove more difficult to shake. But part of the game is based on luck of the draw, so I’d just take this more as the chaotic experience it is rather than anything you can strategize too much. Your sprint recharges slowly enough that you can’t outrun the cops for too long (though this is a good reason to keep a trap or two unsprung for when the cops do come).

The game requires an interesting approach to each level, because you have to scope things out. Where can you get quick kills and body disposals? Which traps are at my disposal? Any escape routes available? Why is that man fighting that bear? Party Hard Go sits somewhere between deliberation and chaos. You have to play slow at times, picking off targets and taking risks if you don’t want to be chased by the cops – and your sprinting is limited, so that’s probably for the best if you aren’t in that situation. And as the party starts to whittle down in numbers, the goal can be in your grasp, as you decide to just go on a murdering spree now that you can clear everyone out without much more hassle. And sometimes, you’ll get a nice trap that takes care of a lot of trouble for you. But do you want to use those traps to thin the herd quickly, or to get you out of a sticky situation with law enforcement? You have to decide, and even adjust from session to session what you have available to you.

I will say that the whole game is kind of sloppy and sometimes contradictory. The line between detection and escape is slim enough that you really don’t want to have to deal with escape at any given point. It’s best to play smart and slow (and the game doesn’t seem to have any real time reward for fast play – which I actually kind of like), take your kills when you can, and just lay low until everything blows over. It does mean that the most thrilling moments are the most troublesome, like when you have to kill someone before they can call the cops. If the game offered more powerups more often from the mysterious stranger that rolls around every so often, or had traps be more effective, then perhaps the game would be a little more interesting in terms of the combat. As it is, the experience just winds up feeling like a weird contradiction: a goofy game that forces you to not be that goofy and chaotic in order to do well.

I guess that sloppiness in gameplay does fit Party Hard Go quite well, though. The whole premise of the title goes between its absurd gameplay, which has you committing mass murder in crazy ways, but then the narrative sections between the action make things serious and weird. Like, the gameplay has you tossing bodies to sharks, and watching aliens abduct people. It’s silly. Then the story talks about a cop whose daughter died, or something. The description calls it a “(not)serious" story, but this is the kind of concept where the player needs to be as detached from it as possible. The game gives you all these ridiculous scenarios, and then makes you feel guilty for trying to get into the fantasy of the concept. And it’s not in a clever way that Hotline Miami was able to make you feel guilty for its violence. Perhaps the story is just trying to replicate this over-the-top nature of it, and just doesn’t display enough self-awareness to be satirical. I can’t tell if the voice acting is meant to be intentionally bad or is just kind of over-acted. This game is just so tonally bizarre, or unique, at least.

Honestly, I’m not sure what the huge fuss was with adapting this game to mobile, because it works fine? There aren’t a whole lot of controls, the game works fine with a virtual stick and buttons. Perhaps figuring out how to make the game scene work on mobile was the concern, since the entire game is viewable at once on desktop. Perhaps there were technical concerns with making zooming work? Why this was such a big deal to adapt it to mobile seems odd in retrospect, but perhaps it’s just a testament to the work put in that it all works okay. While I feel like the virtual controls work the best, you may prefer the tap-and-gesture controls, which at least try to make the game work as more a touch-native experience. They work fine on the phone, but on the tablet I think I prefer the virtual controls, for sure. The game does work fine on my iPhone 6 Plus, so I wouldn’t worry too much about any kind of performance issues. I do welcome the support for video recording and streaming via ReplayKit, along with iCloud synchronization between devices.

Party Hard Go finally hitting mobile feels like a big deal since the game was so iffy on hitting mobile. And here we are. It’s a unique game, from its ultraviolence, to quasi-stealth gameplay, to its…well, unique themes, let’s put it that way. It’s a one-of-a-kind game, nowhere near excellence, but if you’ve been intrigued to give it a shot, why not do so now on mobile?

An opening cut-scene sets the stage for the story. It’s your typical forces of light versus forces of darkness bit, but the use of polygonal models and full voice acting give it a little more oomph than the usual social RPG fare. Honestly, I kind of zoned out on it, and the terrible voice acting certainly didn’t help. At any rate, once it’s over with, you’ll have your customary additional content download, then go through a tutorial that runs on a bit longer than it should. Missions are used as a breadcrumb trail to guide you through all of the various systems the game has to offer, though there isn’t much here you won’t already be familiar with if you’ve played any other social RPGs.

As is usual for the genre, you’ll need to build a team from the weaker characters you can earn somewhat easily through battles and stronger ones you’ll get a chance to pull here and there with one of three different special currencies. Characters can be fused to give one of them additional experience points, and when you’ve raised a character to their maximum level and gathered the appropriate materials, you’ll be able to evolve them into a new, more powerful form. Each character has a cost, keeping you from stacking all of your best characters onto a single team. You’ll have to make some choices about who you want to bring with you based on their unique talents and elemental affinities.

There are a variety of options as far as entering battles go. The regular adventure mode takes you through a series of quests, spitting out some story content here and there. The elemental dungeons change daily and give you a way to gather evolution materials. A magic tower helps you gather special runes you can equip for bonuses. There’s a duel arena where you can face off against another player’s team in real-time, a siege battle where you can battle other players asynchronously, and a guerilla battle where you can gather enhancement and selling materials. All pretty standard stuff, just with fancier names.

Each quest takes the form of a number of skirmishes against enemy characters. Your goal is to clear them all out by using the attacks of your team members. There are six different character classes in all. Some of the characters work just like those in Monster Strike. You pull back and launch them towards the enemy to deal damage. Just as in Monster Strike, these characters come in different flavors, with some piercing the enemy, others ricocheting off with a magic attack, and some who stop dead in their tracks when they hit an enemy. There are also characters who use projectile attacks. They won’t move around unless they get nudged by another character. Instead, you’ll pull back to bring up a target reticule of some type. Archers will fire a spread of shots, while characters with cannons and such can launch powerful area attacks. There’s a greater mix of mechanics on display here, making for some novel encounters.

You’ll also have to mind the battle area itself, as it may contain certain gimmicks you can use against your enemies. Naturally, these gimmicks can be turned on you just as easily, though the computer opponent is generally not that clever. When the computer has one of their character turns come up, they won’t usually be sneaky about it, they’ll just try to overcome you with brute force. If it manages to knock out your team’s health points completely, you’ll be given the usual choice between using premium currency to continue, or simply taking the loss and trying again from scratch. Turn order is determined by character speed, and the enemies will often get to go first. Speed is quite important to take into account in this game, since you’ll probably want your projectile attackers to go earlier so that they can clear out blockers for your heavy melee units.

Again, Knight Slinger doesn’t go too far outside of the established lines of this sub-genre. Taking on quests consumes stamina that can be regained by leveling up, spending currency, or simply waiting. Pulling new characters requires one of three currencies, with the prize generally fitting the expense you sink in. You’re encouraged to bring the characters of other players into battle with you to earn friend coins, which can be exchanged for some weaker characters. You’ll naturally need to be connected to the Internet to play, and there are timed events a-plenty. The game doles out a reasonable trickle of the best currency, particularly in the beginning, but you’re naturally encouraged to spend some real money to get more if you really want to play the game to its fullest.

You can expect a smooth and breezy time in the beginning, but the game does start to squeeze you as you get further in. Doing things requires more stamina, and it doesn’t take long for the increased costs to outpace your growth via leveling up. Evolutions and enhancements start to cost more gold and require more rare materials, and the monsters get quite a bit tougher to encourage you to keep your team as close to the cutting edge as possible. Knight Slinger is pretty good about providing content for players of all levels, but you might find it necessary to spin your wheels for a while at certain points to get your team up to snuff for the next challenge.

Apart from the minor tweaks to Monster Strike‘s core gameplay mechanics, the big star of the show in Knight Slinger is the presentation. Everything is rendered with polygons, allowing the game to use dynamic camera angles and let you look at your characters from a variety of angles. As they generally do, Gamevil appears to have lavished extra attention on the cute female characters in the roster. Fans of heaving bosoms spilling out of inadequate bindings will not be disappointed. But it’s not all sexy ladies, either. There are some other good character designs that go for a cute or cool image.

Sadly, the monsters are pretty lackluster all around. Not that the Dragon Quest Slime is a particularly complex design, but they’ve obviously nicked it for this game. Variations on that slime make up a disappointingly large amount of the enemy roster, particularly early on. The bosses look pretty great, at least. You can tell extra work went into making them stand out. The game also features a large amount of voice acting, and it’s even in English. Unfortunately, it’s both awful and repetitive, a bad combination if ever there was one. Each character has a catch phrase or two, and they are going to remind you of it at every opportunity. I wish I could tell you that there’s an option to shut the voices off, but I couldn’t find one.

There are plenty of strings attached to Knight Slinger, but fans of social RPGs are probably used to most of them by now. If you played and enjoyed Monster Strike and are looking for something to spice up your love of slinging, you should give this one a try. It has a few new ideas that make for some exciting battles, and the graphics are certainly quite nice. Just be aware that as sweet as it is in the early stages, it gets a lot tougher as you go along. Gamevil’s games typically have a harsher difficulty ramp-up than some of their competition, and that’s certainly the case here. But if you’ve played a lot of the game that inspired this one, that steeper difficulty might be just what you’re looking for.

In this game, you’ll be guiding a young witch named Luna who is trying to survive after a revolution forces her and her kind into hiding. The situation isn’t as straightforward as it seems, and Luna will have to get to the bottom of things by solving a series of quests. Many of those quests involve defeating a particular enemy or turning in a particular item, which will require you to find where said target can be found. The crafting system sits at the heart of the game, and you’ll often need to cobble pieces together to get the item you need. You can also upgrade your stats and magic through crafting, so it’s important to collect every ingredient you find and take full advantage of what the system has to offer you.

Ingredients can be found scattered around the world map. It’s ostensibly open from the start, but there are powerful enemies blocking passage to many areas, so you’ll have to get strong enough to beat them before you can fully explore. Happily, defeating enemies also earns you ingredients, and they’re often the rarest and most useful of the lot. In the beginning, you’ll be heavily limited as to how much you’re able to get done in each day of the game, as you won’t have a cheap way of replenishing your magic points. As you get stronger, you’ll be able to handle more battles, go farther, and generally get more done per day.

There are lots of ways to improve your stats. The easiest way is by training outside of Luna’s hideout. You’ll get various stat bonuses at the cost of some of your HP or MP by performing training exercises. You can also boost your stats by preparing and eating certain types of food. It’s important that you don’t neglect this, as you’ll quickly fall behind the enemies in power if you aren’t giving it the proper attention. If you’re not able to beat the gatekeeper enemies, you simply won’t be able to move forward with the story or enter new areas until you get yourself trained up.

Battles are simple turn-based affairs where you can choose to attack, cast a spell, or use an item on your turn. You and the enemy will smack each other until one of you runs out of HP. If that happens to be you, Luna will simply teleport back to her base. Since your HP will be depleted, you’ll lose a day sleeping to restore it, but you won’t have to face a game over screen or anything like that. In addition to training, you can improve your odds in combat by crafting and equipping better magic, or by bringing along an animal buddy. Animal partners can be found in various locations during the game, though you’ll have to figure out how to get them to go with you. Usually, you just have to give them a certain item, but there are a few that are trickier to recruit.

In addition to the main story quests, there are a lot of optional side-quests you can stumble across. They’re not too different from the story quests in terms of what you need to do, however. Some of the toughest parts of the game are optional quests, and there’s even a somewhat lengthy post-game to attend to if you’re still craving more after finishing the main story. If you’re just looking to beat the main story, you’re looking at around 15 hours, but there’s a fair bit more to indulge in if you’re inclined to do so.

Witch Spring 2 has a nice, bright presentation with decent polygonal graphics and good, if somewhat repetitive, music. The artwork has a strong anime vibe to it, and a lot of attention has been paid to making the main character look and animate as cute as possible. The UI is somewhat hard to understand at a glance, but once you learn where everything is, it’s easy enough to use. The English localization is understandable, but could probably use more work to make it sound more natural. The story is kind of silly and predictable anyway, but I could see it having more punch with the right localization.

While it could probably stand to go a little deeper with some of its mechanics, Witch Spring 2 is a fun little jaunt for RPG fans looking for something a little different from the norm. The crafting system is simple but enjoyable, and the battles are straightforward and occasionally quite challenging. At times, the game seems to flirt with being something great, but ultimately, it’s content to spend most of its time just being decent in a very charming way.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of games looking to fill that void. Over on the Nintendo 3DS, the long-running Fire Emblem series has been tearing up the sales charts. PlayStation Vita owners have a selection of Disgaea games and, if nothing else, can access the excellent PlayStation Portable remake of Tactics Ogre. Console and PC owners can play a wide range of games in the genre from indie sensations like The Banner Saga ($9.99) to full-budget offerings like 2K’s XCOM ($4.99) revivals and SEGA’s Valkyria Chronicles series. This is one genre where mobile is no slouch, either. The genre suits the stop and go lifestyle of most mobile gamers well, and touch controls prove to be a benefit rather than taking anything away. Now, one of the great things about the selection of strategy RPGs on mobile is that most of them go in their own direction in one way or another. The downside of that is that if you’re just looking for a clone of Final Fantasy Tactics, you’re going to come up relatively dry.

Interestingly, that’s a niche that has been served in the Japanese mobile gaming market for quite some time. Rideon Japan, perhaps best known outside of Japan for Adventure Bar Story ($2.99), has been making mobile RPGs since the feature phone days. Their titles are typically low-cost affairs that recycle their engine and assets in a manner not so different from Kemco’s developers. In fact, in the early days, Kemco used to publish their games in Japan. Typically, Rideon keeps away from doing straightforward JRPGs, instead doing their best to cobble together budget odes to quirkier games like the Atelier series. Their strongest success in Japan has been with the Mercenaries Saga series of strategy RPGs, but up until now, those games have largely stayed in Japan. The series finally got its first official English localization in July of 2015 when Circle Entertainment brought Mercenaries Saga 2 ($2.99) to the Nintendo 3DS eShop worldwide, and that translated version has now been made available to iOS players.

Mercenaries Saga 2 isn’t shy about where it draws its inspiration from. There are a lot of things that will be familiar here for any fan of Matsuno’s Tactics games, both in terms of the broad strokes of the gameplay mechanics and in smaller details like being able to throw rocks. The game consists of just over 30 missions that send you to various isometric battlefields to slug it out in turn-based combat with packs of enemies. You’ll get a little cut-scene that sets up each mission, and if you feel like hopping off the roller coaster for a bit of grinding, there are skirmish maps available between story missions. There’s even a job system that requires you to unlock more powerful jobs by gaining levels in your current job. Battles yield special points you can use to unlock and strengthen job abilities.

Before you get too excited, however, it’s worth mentioning that all of this stuff is on a much smaller scale than in Final Fantasy Tactics. Fewer jobs and abilities, a lighter roster of characters, smaller maps, and considerably scaled-down production values. You don’t have nearly as many customization options, and the missions themselves lack the devious planning that went into some of the more famous stages from Final Fantasy Tactics. It hopefully goes without saying that the story can’t hold a candle to the tales written by Matsuno. All of this is to be expected, mind you. A small developer making a low-budget game designed around feature phone specs and input methods is not going to be able to match a major effort from Square Enix. But it hits enough of the same buttons that, while it may not scratch your itch for a new Final Fantasy Tactics, it grazes that itch well enough that you’ll feel some temporary relief.

The biggest thing spoiling the fun in Mercenaries Saga 2 is a vestige of the game’s origins as a feature phone game. The controls are just about as terrible as they could be. The game was clearly designed to be played with a feature phone’s directional keys and buttons, and although the iOS version gives you a choice between virtual keys and a pure touch set-up, neither one works as well as they need to. The virtual keys are small and fiddly, while the touch controls seem to fumble when it comes to targeting grid spaces on the board. You can easily switch between the two using an on-screen button, but it’s pretty irritating to constantly flip back and forth, so I mostly ended up gritting my teeth and dealing with the drawbacks of the virtual keys. It’s also only playable in portrait mode, which was fine for me, but might turn off those who prefer to play in landscape.

The game also suffers from some balance issues. The thief job is almost entirely useless. They can barely hold their own in a fight, and both their stealing command and treasure-searching skills rarely yield the desired results. By contrast, magic users are almost too powerful, lacking the delay in casting their spells that some other titles use. The map designs and enemy placements are just sort of there, but the tight quarters can make for some tense battles, particularly if you focus on the story and avoid the extra experience that can be earned in skirmishes.

The consequences of losing a character in battle aren’t nearly as severe as some other strategy RPGs. You have five turns to get a fallen character up on their feet. If you can’t do that, they’ll retreat from the battlefield, forfeiting the chance to earn additional experience. Otherwise, they’ll be just fine, waiting to be used in the next battle. There are a variety of conditions that you’ll come across during the course of the game, but generally, as long as you keep at least one member of your team breathing at the end of the battle, you’ll win. Meat and potatoes at best, but they’re seasoned well enough to be a decent meal.

One area where Mercenaries Saga 2 does manage to break away from Final Fantasy Tactics is in its inclusion of IAP. There’s a premium currency in the game that you can buy and exchange for some extra special items in the shop. It would be nice if there were a reliable way to earn that currency in game, but losing access to those items doesn’t have that big of an effect on the main game anyway. This being a Rideon game, there is naturally an attempt at a crafting system, as well. It’s very basic and half-hearted, but you can fuse together any magical gear you find to try to create something new. Most of the gear I tended to pull off of enemies actually had worse stats than the normal stuff, though, so I generally ignored it in favor of regular gear.

Even with its overall lack of originality, control issues, and occasionally dull encounter design, Mercenaries Saga 2 follows the notes well enough that it should be of interest to fans of Final Fantasy Tactics. You’ll get about fifteen to twenty hours of solid strategy RPG for your money, and even if it’s not the most creative of games, it does its routine diligently. With any luck, this game’s English release will point to further localizations from Rideon, particularly this game’s sequel. Mercenaries Saga 2 is just good enough that I could imagine the sequels eventually leading to something more interesting.

As the title implies, 1-Bit Rogue is a simplified version of a roguelike. But more than that, it’s a simplified version of a Japanese-style roguelike, a sub-genre some might argue is already in a more streamlined form. Games like Shiren the Wanderer found a way to boil down the often highly-complex rules of a genre that mostly existed on home computers, and make it palatable for the simpler control inputs and technical capabilities of consoles.

The end result has a great deal in common with PC roguelikes, but is different enough that a person could conceivably like one and not the other. Both varieties pride themselves on extreme difficulty and making the most of your luck, good or bad. The main way they differ is that in Western roguelikes, you don’t typically carry anything over from attempt to attempt save your own increased knowledge. With enough studying and a bit of luck, you could conceivably win quite a few Western roguelikes on your first attempt.

That’s not the case for Japanese roguelikes, which often place an emphasis on preparation for the one perfect run. The Shiren games allow you to stow items in a storehouse where you can retrieve them on subsequent runs. You can refine a weapon over the course of several runs, building up to the point where you will finally be powerful enough to score a victory. Again, with a little luck. It’s that idea, the notion of powering up over the course of multiple runs, that sits at the core of 1-Bit Rogue. You start off with one character unlocked, the warrior. As you play through the game, you’ll gather coins, which can be used in that run for a variety of purposes, or carried forward to spend on things like stat upgrades and new characters after your run is finished. You’d have to have a tremendous run of luck to get very far with your default character, but as you build up their HP, you’ll be able to reach new depths and eventually beat the game.

The gameplay itself is as simple as it could be. On each floor, you need to find the stairs to the next level of the dungeon. That requires you to first hit a switch located somewhere in the level that will reveal those stairs. There are monsters patrolling the hallways who don’t seem to like you very much, statues that can grant you boons or curses, chests that contain one of any number of useful goodies, and traps that will probably kill you if you trip them. What makes this simpler in structure than the average Japanese-style roguelike comes down to a few things.

First, the maps are quite small. They start off almost fitting completely on one screen, and while they get a little bigger as they go, you’ll never need a map or anything like that to keep track of things. Second, there are always going to be a set number of each type of object per stage, depending on depth. For example, one treasure chest and two monsters. Third, you can only carry one item at a time. Any found medicine will be drank on the spot, any weapons you pick up will replace the current one, and anything your character can’t use will be turned into cash.

Defeating enemies will add to your maximum HP most of the time, so it’s important to do some killing now and then. You’ll have to balance your blood thirst against how easily your weapons break, however. Weapons are only good for a set number of kills before they break, and since you can only carry one at a time, that leaves you quite vulnerable until such time as you can find another one in a chest somewhere. This can lead to some hairy situations, particularly if the only chest on a level holds medicine instead of a weapon. You can still fight back without a weapon, but if you’re more than a few levels in, the chances are quite good that your opponent will be dealing more damage per turn to you than you are to him. You’ll have to make tough choices about whether you want to seek out fights to make sure you’re strong enough to survive the fights that seek you out, or saving your weapon to make sure that when those fights come, you aren’t left barehanded.

There are lots of different enemy types, each with their own stats and behaviors. Since your character’s abilities don’t really change that much through the course of each playthrough, this variety of opponents helps keep the game fresh. In addition to adding to your maximum HP total, beating enemies will also reward you with varying amounts of coins. Within a playthrough, you can use those coins to pray at the altars and statues you might come across, or for a one-time continue should you die. There are two gods you can pray to. The first will give you blessings that are only beneficial, while the other will give you a curse that might benefit you in one way and hurt you in another. You’ll want to make good use of these options, but you’ll also need to save up those coins, because after your run is completed, you can use them to level up your character’s HP permanently.

You’ll also need an awful lot of those coins if you want to unlock the four additional characters. The prices on the last couple of characters are particularly steep, but the coins add up faster than you might expect. There’s no way to buy them with real money, so your only option is to grind them out. The game’s sole IAP simply adds a 3-bit color mode and strips out the ads that otherwise appear quite frequently in both banner and pop-up forms. Once you’ve purchased that IAP, the only ads remaining in the game are the incentivized ones you can choose to watch for a continue in lieu of paying the gold penalty. Similar to when you pay for a continue using coins, you can only continue once by this method, so everyone is on the same playing field.

In terms of the presentation, 1-Bit Rogue isn’t far off from other Skipmore efforts such as Fairune (Free) and Drancia (Free). One key difference is that the game is, by default, only displayed in black and white. If you buy the 3-bit mode IAP, you’ll have access to an optional color mode that adds a few splashes of color to things. Fortunately, both modes are clear and detailed enough to support the gameplay. I found I preferred the 3-bit mode a bit, but either choice will give you a charmingly faux-retro vibe. The music follows a similar route, and if you like chiptunes, you’ll probably enjoy what’s coming out of the speakers here.

1-Bit Rogue is a fun little pick-up-and-play title, but given the embarrassment of riches in the roguelite genre on iOS, it doesn’t really stand out in any significant way. The controls can be a little fussy, and getting your character in shape for a proper run at the final boss involves a fair chunk of grinding. I’d also advise strongly against sticking with the free version for very long, because it really leans hard on the advertisements. Still, the presentation is attractive and the game on the whole is competent if not terribly exciting. It’s hard to get too thrilled for an average roguelite these days, though, and that’s basically all that 1-Bit Rogue is.

RETSNOM ($2.99) tries to reinvigorate that concept by giving it a literal twist. It tries its best to be subversive in both gameplay and narrative. I would say it’s a partial success in both regards, but it’s lacking a certain coherence across the board that keeps it from being all that it could have been. It’s also a very difficult game, and only partly by design. You’ll need a good head on your shoulders to figure out the solutions to each stage, but you’ll also need quick reflexes and the platforming chops to execute those plans. Those skills can only work in coordination with responsive controls, however, and RETSNOM occasionally has problems with that, making for a very frustrating experience at times.

The premise of the game sees you playing a scientist who is desperate to save his daughter’s life. There’s been a zombie outbreak, and his daughter was infected. The lab he works at is trying to prepare an antidote, but there is no way it will be ready in time to save his daughter. He somehow stumbles across a time portal to the future and reasons that if humanity has survived, someone must have developed an antidote. He means to get it and bring it back, doing whatever it takes to bring his child back to good health. When he reaches the future, he finds that the lab has been made into a sort of maze, most likely to keep the zombies out. The only way to move forward is through use of special mirrors that allow him to flip the world. The story is quite tightly connected to the gameplay, and although I feel like it drops the ball a little at the end, I was certainly interested the whole way through.

The game takes place across 5 worlds and more than 60 stages. Your primary goal in each stage is to retrieve two door parts and a key, then make your way to the exit. There are also stuffed rabbits you can collect if you’re feeling particularly courageous. They’re usually in hard-to-reach or dangerous locations, but for the most part, they never require you to do anything you won’t end up having to eventually do in the course of solving the regular stage goals, so you might as well enjoy the free practice. Your character starts off with the ability to run and jump. Not long after starting the game, you’ll get your first mirror, which allows you to flip a section of the world around you from left to right. For example, if there’s a wall in front of you and nothing behind you, you can flip the wall so that it’s now behind you. Your abilities will expand throughout the game, but as with the story, I feel like spoiling too much would be a disservice to the game. Suffice it to say, you’re going to have to bend your brain in some new ways before it’s all done.

Here’s what really makes it tough, however. You’re not limited to a single flip at a time. As long as you are outside the boundaries of the original flip, you can flip again and again. You can only undo them in reverse order, though, so you’ll need to be careful with that. RETSNOM doesn’t take long before it starts leaning heavily on this mechanic for solving stages, requiring you to figure out all of the various folds and clippings that will cobble together a route. It’s refreshingly free form, but as is often the case, that freedom comes with a cost. Solutions often feel so ramshackle that it’s hard to know if you’re doing what you ought to even as you’re doing it. In the shorter stages, that’s a wonderful feeling, but as things get increasingly complex, it can be really frustrating not knowing if you’re chasing a false lead that will force you to start all over again from your last checkpoint.

For as aggravating as it can be, it’s hard to walk away from RETSNOM. When the mechanics are clicking just right, that feeling of constructing your very own solution is immensely satisfying. The somber atmosphere and slowly portioned out story create just enough mystery that you can’t help but wonder what is coming next. It’s just unfortunate that whatever is coming next is often tucked behind multiple jumping mirror flips, zombie hordes, and false walls. It’s those mid-air flips that often prove to be the undoing of the virtual controls. You’ll need to hold an arrow for direction, hit the jump button, and also hit the mirror-flip button at just the right time, to say nothing of the complications that arrive when the full move set is available. It’s doable, but it adds a layer of irritation on top of what is already a very challenging game.

If you have a lot of patience, the atmosphere and unusual spin on familiar mechanics in RETSNOM might win you over. The open-ended approach to puzzle-solving it encourages is certainly appealing, and the visual and audio presentation both do a good job of supporting the gameplay and story. There are two endings, with the second one shedding some additional light on the events that set the game in motion, and the optional collectibles will challenge your mastery of the mechanics. There’s a lot to like here. On the other hand, the puzzle solutions are sometimes incredibly obscure, and the virtual controls sometimes aren’t up to what the game design demands of the player. If you enjoy puzzle platformers, it’s an easy recommendation, but I’m not sure how enjoyable it’s going to be for those outside of those lines.

Combining action-adventure fundamentals with a brick-breaking combat system, The Lost Shield is an interesting take on a simple genre with some neat nuances. Playing as a warrior that wields a shield that shoots out (and subsequently reflects) a powerful projection that deals damage to all in your path, it’s pretty easy to see the Breakout elements early on. The great thing about The Lost Shield is there’s a bit more content to experience beyond static enemies that masquerade as bricks. You’ll encounter enemies that charge at you, enemies that erratically move to avoid your attacks — you’ll even encounter foes that shoot back, forcing you to balance between avoiding projectiles while making sure that you’re there to bounce your own back. With enemy portals and even boss battles, there’s a decent amount of variety.

Surprisingly, The Lost Shield also does a decent job in preserving some ‘exploration’ elements and makes the game a bit more than simply a re-skin of a Breakout game. Every map has a hidden room that, if discovered, unlocks a bonus stage at the conclusion of that map. There are also doors that can be opened with switches, and tons of environmental barriers that can eventually be destroyed, opening up more paths for your projectile. The currency collected in-game can be spent on permanent upgrades to the various power-ups that are randomly earned in-game. Your ‘brick bar’ consists of your hero and any other adventurers you rescue during your travels. Each one has its own reward for rescue and you can unlock the ability to rescue even more folks within the in-game store.

Beyond the genre mashup, The Lost Shield is also a fun love-letter from a visual standpoint to the titles from the Game Boy era. Monochorme visuals are delightful in their own way and the music features some pretty infectious (if repetitive) tunes. When emulating an art style from this generation, there’s a potential for alienating some players, but I think this game achieves it pretty well.

The biggest issue one can encounter with The Lost Shield has to do with the way it implements its Breakout gameplay. Specifically, the “ball physics” have a habit of not traveling where you think they can go, and attempts to steer the ball with various moves from your paddle unfortunately don’t end with the results expected. It’s almost as if the ball really has a mind of its own and your primary duty is to just keep it in the field of play rather than being able to significantly change its course. This can lead to some pretty ridiculous situations, such as the ball being stuck in a near endless loop in certain areas of the various maps without anything the player can do to change that. Considering each map also carries a time limit, these ‘nuances’ of the ball physics become less of an oddity and more of a frustration.

As stated earlier, typically the hardest job of a game liked The Lost Shield is to successfully meld the multiple genres into a cohesive title. Interestingly enough, this is one of the more achievable aspects of the game. Unfortunately, the issues with the more fundamental elements (namely the ball physics) put a damper on what is otherwise an interesting game. While I’ll certainly say it’s still worth checking out, I feel like some minor tweaks could make it far more enjoyable.

In a setup very similar to the wall-clinging platformer Meat Boy, Kenji is a ninja that’s on an adventure to save his love interest from Dr. Mad. Naturally, ninjas have a little more at their disposal than the average protagonist, and in addition to his agility, Kenji also has access to a few tricks like the aforementioned wall jumps. If you’re fed up with touch controls it offers MFi controller support, which works wonderfully for the precision double jumps you’re going to need to get by. This is just as much about mastering the controls as it is hammering out twitch responses, so don’t be afraid if you’re more about exploration than action.

I’m conflicted on the look the development trio ended up going with ultimately for Tons of Bullets though, despite their victories with the fundamentals. While it’s functional to the point where most of the jumps you’re going to make won’t be confusing in any way (the same goes for figuring out what is and isn’t an acceptable stealth state), it could be a lot more impressive than a basic pixelated presentation. Looking at the announcement art it follows a voxel-like style that’s like a brighter, more cartoony Minecraft, and that’s really what the teams at play should have went with. Games have done this before without going too flashy, and a follow-up with a more pronounced look would go a long way.

Like the League of Evil series, which ended up being just that — a series — there’s a lot of potential here to build on this premise and keep rolling with it. Kenji isn’t exactly what I’d call a memorable character but he’s recognizable, and even though just by looking at a selection of screenshots you probably won’t walk away all that impressed, after actually playing it, it’s something I could pick up out of a lineup. Bosses could stand to be more unique, but the enemies, layouts, and themes are great.

But while it doesn’t really do anything new, the good news is that it packs in pretty much everything you’d expect from a Metroidvania platformer. There’s a number of different action  and platforming concepts, delivered every 20 minutes or so. That’s pretty much the perfect pace too, because just as you’re learning something and start to pick it up for future runs, something new comes along. The entire system of jumping is so complex that it allows for some great, open levels, and although the idea of kitting out a ninja with guns is silly, actually works in its favor in tandem with that openness.

As a bonus (which is kind of a rarity these days) you’re buying the full game here, with no IAP involved. It’ll last you roughly an afternoon, but that’s if you’re playing nonstop. And while I enjoyed my first playthrough, I wouldn’t really consider springing for a new one for some time, until the layouts are mostly removed from my memory. There were enough secret areas or zones off the beaten critical path for it to be worth  replaying it so soon.

As long as you go in with your expectations in check forTons of Bullets — as it has literally no surprises for you in store — you probably won’t walk away disappointed.  You’ll stumble into re-used ideas like teleporter pads, straight-forward boss fights, and vehicles, but you’ll have fun doing it. Hopefully the idea well hasn’t run dry, and the teams responsible can pick up right where they left off for a sequel.

The free trial version of RPG Creator actually allows you to do quite a bit, at least enough to let you know if this is going to be your thing or not. You can build a fairly small RPG using the default assets and play it. You can also download and play any of the RPGs other players have published, which should give you an idea of the scope you can expect from the full version. If you want to do things like access cloud saves, customize items, import assets, make larger games, or publish them, you’ll need to plunk down the cash to buy the premium version IAP. With that in hand, you’ll be able to make RPGs that at least superficially resemble something like a Kemco game. In terms of mechanics, you’re more or less stuck with a vanilla turn-based system with experience-based leveling, though. So if you’re planning on making the next Chrono Trigger, you’re probably out of luck here.

That’s kind of the essential problem with RPG Creator. It’s quite good at what it does, giving you control over a ton of options great and small. On the other hand, it’s not quite as good at what it does as the PC version of RPG Maker is, nor does it give you the same options to monetize your finished product. Making an RPG in either of these programs is a pretty hefty undertaking, so if you’re going to put in that much effort, why use the more limited of the two? Of course, if you don’t have a PC, don’t want to work on one, or simply want something to mess around with on your mobile device, RPG Creator will probably have value to you. If nothing else, it works as a nice little sketchbook for spit-balling ideas with. To its credit, once you’ve bought the premium IAP, you can use all of its features without any additional hardware necessary. You might need some other apps to create music or graphics, since this program doesn’t even include so much as a sprite editor, but you can conceivably do it all on your iPhone or iPad. That’s kind of neat.

It takes some time to come to grips with it, though, especially if you’ve never used anything like it before. The program isn’t very big on explaining anything, either. You’ll have to head over to Degica’s web page to even get so much as a basic explanation of the UI. This is normally where you would head to some sort of online community to take advantage of the collective knowledge of other users, but the English community for RPG Creator iOS is absolutely tiny right now. You’ll have to be patient and rely on trial and error to learn how many things work at the moment. Time will tell if the English community will pick up the way the Japanese community apparently already has.

Once you’ve learned how things work, RPG Creator becomes a lot more enjoyable to play with. The touch interface works fairly well, and while you can’t really mess around with the gameplay pillars all that much, you can change just about every parameter in services to those pillars. If you want to rename all the equipment, you can. If you want to adjust the encounter rate, or the level cap, or a character’s title, that’s up to you. You can create events that help move the story along, and the amount of details available to you for flagging those events is quite impressive. You’re able to jump into your game at any time to make sure everything is working okay, and when you’ve finally finished your masterpiece, you can upload it for all other RPG Creator users to play.

If you’re just looking for something to dabble with on your mobile device, RPG Creator might be up your alley. The problem is that doing anything satisfying with it takes time, and that time is probably better invested in the computer version of RPG Maker. Not just because it offers more options in terms of constructing your game, but also because it gives you more freedom to export it and, if you so choose, to sell it. With this version, you can certainly put in the time and get something cool out of it, but you’re only able to distribute it to other RPG Creator users, and you certainly can’t earn money from it.

I’d recommend checking out the free demo portion of RPG Creator. If nothing else, you can try out the RPGs that others have made. It’s harder to recommend unlocking the premium features, however. If you actually find yourself bumping up against the demo boundaries, you might just be the type of person who’ll get a lot out of opening up the rest of the app. Who knows? Maybe with time and effort, you can be the next Kemco.

In Antiquia Lost, we follow the adventures of Bine, a young man with a mysterious power. Early on, he meets up with Lunaria, a sort of slime princess from a neighboring tribe. The two are almost immediately joined by Jade, a cat-man who serves the old guy role for this game, and Safira, another goo girl who serves as a soldier for the royal family. Important people are disappearing all over the world, and worst of all, the disappearances are seemingly set up to put the three peaceful tribes that populate the planet at odds with each other. There are four endings to the game in total, with the one you receive determined by who you have the highest trust level with.

Trust is built by answering questions correctly during certain portions of the game. This time, it’s not just about which ending you’ll get. Building trust unlocks more powerful Brave Arts for Bine to perform with his teammates, which provides a nice practical value for not irritating everyone. Brave Arts are basically the game’s limit breaks, so you won’t be seeing them terribly often. They’re vital for surviving some of the higher difficulty settings and battles, though. As with many of the recent Kemco RPGs, Antiquia Lost can be a breeze or a fierce fight depending on which difficulty level you play on. There’s no real incentive beyond the challenge itself for playing on the higher levels, but it’s nice to have options.

Lunaria is the main thing that sets this game apart from previous releases. She doesn’t level up in the usual manner. Instead, she eats gems that are found on enemies. In practice, she’ll gain power as she goes from the gems she automatically consumes, but you can and should stuff her with extra gems if you want to turn her into a powerhouse. The other characters follow a typical system of leveling up, with accessories you can equip to learn new skills. The skills themselves can be powered up through usage, and as is the norm with EXE-Create, the cap on everything is absurdly high. If you’re inclined to beef everyone up, you’ll have a lot to do here. The post-game content is a bit lighter than the Asdivine games, however, so there’s less incentive to do that than usual. One potentially interesting addition is that of map actions for certain characters. For example, Jade can smash rocks on the map to open new passages. Unfortunately, this element is terribly underused in this game, with only a small handful of locations to use each ability. I hope it will show up more fully-formed in future titles.

Otherwise, it’s the same old business here. Travel from town to town setting right what went wrong, usually by venturing to a nearby cave and beating the stuffing out of some monsters in turn-based battles. Buy new equipment now and then, seek out treasure wherever it may be found, and watch the story slowly come together. The translation lacks the punch seen in some of EXE-Create’s better games, but it’s adequate enough. It doesn’t help that there isn’t a designated comedy character this time around, so the writers don’t really have a good place to dump their jokes. That said, Lunaria is an interesting character, and Safira has her moments, too. The mysterious Alma carries a lot of the narrative weight over the long term, but isn’t really a strong enough character to shoulder it all. Bine is regrettably as vanilla a protagonist as they come.

Antiquia Lost is available in both ad-supported free-to-play and premium versions. The premium version will give you a bunch of Alchemy Stones, the game’s premium currency, and is ad-free, but in all other respects, the two versions are identical. That’s nothing new for Kemco, nor is the presence of an IAP shop anything outside the norm, but for what I believe is the first time ever in a traditional JRPG from the publisher, the premium currency is starting to leak outside of that shop. Each character has an additional accessory slot that can only be unlocked by spending Alchemy Stones. You also have a farm where you can plant seeds to get stat-boosting fruits after a certain amount of real time has passed. By default, one pot is open for you to use, but if you want to unlock the other three, you’ll need to pay up. None of this is essential for beating the game, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit concerned for future games in light of this. At any rate, you can still grind out the premium currency if you’re patient.

The weapon refining system makes its return here, as does a random gatcha-style ticket system for drawing new equipment. This time there are two premium draws that you can only access by spending premium currency, along with a third draw that can be played by using tickets dropped by enemies. There’s some decent loot to be found in these draws, but as usual, the best items are reserved for the in-game shop. Weapon types you won’t find anywhere else in the game are available in the premium shop, as are gems that change the appearances of some of your characters. Nothing related to the story is locked up in the shop, however, so they’re still playing things pretty fairly for now.

Most Kemco releases have issues with scrolling smoothly, but Antiquia Lost feels worse than usual to me. Playing on my iPhone 6S Plus, the game was choppy on a somewhat regular basis. It’s unfortunate, because the visuals are otherwise reasonably good. EXE-Create does nice work with battle animations in general, and Antiquia Lost holds up that tradition. I wish the developer had time to do to the overworld scenes what they’ve done with the battle graphics in their games, but I suppose when you’re on a six to eight week turnaround on game development, you do what you can.

Antiquia Lost is another decent RPG from EXE-Create. It’s utterly uninspired, but it’s competent in most respects. The characters and their interactions are fun, even if we’ve seen all of these types before in previous releases. It doesn’t offer up quite as much content as the recent Asdivine games have, particularly in the post-game, and the increased focus on monetization means that I’d more strongly recommend the free version over the paid one this time around. If you’re in the mood for a new traditional-style JRPG on iOS, though, it’s not like we’re flush with choices at the moment. If you can tolerate the total lack of originality, there’s definitely some enjoyment to be mined from this game.

Okay so the creatures in Skyhill aren’t traditional zombies (they’re more like mutants), but it’s close enough. After waking up at the top of a 100 floor hotel 28 Days Later style, your job is to get to the bottom and escape after your supplies are low. Enter the aforementioned interesting idea mixed with a side order of roguelike. Slowly but surely you’ll make your way to the bottom, forging your own story in the process and constantly doing battle. You might only make it several floors before getting worn out, with no food left, and no items, so be warned if you’re not into that kind of challenge.

Yes, even though you can alter the difficulty level, it’s an all or nothing deal. You’ll get a randomized layout, complete with random enemy placements and items, which can either facilitate or hinder your goal. If you die, it’s all over and you’ll start again at the top. Somehow even with its gamey art style, Skyhill manages to be unsettling. It creates a compelling enough apocalyptic world even though the only bit you can see is a hotel. The mutants are sufficiently disgusting, and the dark setting of the building and the notion of randomness adds tension.

Movement is also a resource. Going into a zone costs a unit of food (which, when depleted, starts hacking away at your health), regardless of what you find. In other words you could come across a treasure trove of items after fighting off optional enemies or an empty room. Even with situations that involved the latter I was hard pressed to call it “annoying." Combat takes a similarly smooth approach. When fighting ghouls you have the option to go for a strong but wildly inaccurate strike, a balanced attack, or a weak but precise swing. It’s a consistently nerve wracking choice from beginning to end in any given confrontation, as you can go for broke and topple an enemy in seconds, or completely miss with the same brutal chain of attacks.

Fights change on a dime too, as different enemy types and new weapons enter the picture. Even though the scheme is akin to an old school Telnet system it doesn’t get old, and the fact that it plays out so gracefully on a touch screen doesn’t hurt. The same goes for tapping to move from room to room or floor to floor. Finding new gear can be a rush, but there’s also a crafting system that involves creating new tools and food. It’s a tiny thing, but it makes every pickup pertinent. Whereas a small find like a muffin or a wrench might be a useless pickup in another game, Skyhill encourages exploration.

But as thrilling as runs can be, they can feel equally dull. The roguelike shtick is random in theory but sometimes Skyhill‘s runs are just too similar. Several mechanics like repairing the main elevator to go back to the top to recuperate are neat, but there needs to be more of that. More meta cross playthrough concepts would help elevate round to round sessions. A strict adherence to the roguelike formula can be fine at times, but when you’ve basically shown your hand after an hour or so there’s an issue. It’s great that on iOS at least you can get a few floors in here and there in a run, and that the premium purchase ensures that you’re not getting nickel and dimed with power-ups and balances towards microtransactions though.

Once you’ve played through Skyhill, you’ve seen basically everything you need to see. In fact, the same criticism could be levied even if you’ve only experienced half of it, since there just isn’t much here in general to fiddle around with after you’ve picked up the gist of the crafting system. But since the atmosphere and gimmick are so well implemented, that alone makes this a zombie survival game worth checking out.

As a hardcore game that skews towards throwing tons of bullets on-screen at once (though not nearly as much as a true danmaku, or, bullet hell title, like many of Cave’s works), this isn’t something you can merely pick up and expect to master. In fact, there’s far more packed in to alienate you beyond that stage. This is as wacky of an anime game as you’re going to get, as the cast is comprised of characters like the son of Dracula, a young witch who wished to reverse her aging process, and a self-conscious magic carpet rider.

It’s all old school but I like it that way. Backdrops have cheering civilians populating them (think Street Fighter stages), it’s easy to tell the difference between friendly and enemy fire, and the controls (which are drag and touch, with two easy charge shot and bomb buttons on the side) are simplistic. At this point playing shmups on a touch interface has become a second nature, and although I’ll always prefer the precision of a d-pad, I’d gladly trade a pad any day to play games that are exclusive to the mobile space.

There’s a certain charm to pixel art that endures the test of time. It has the penchant for looking washed out if it’s blown up at a high, non-native resolution like a current generation console or PC, but a mobile device serves as a pocket timewarp of sorts to decades past, with a near lossless level of fidelity.  It’s a great excuse to show off the game’s many details like the aforementioned little extras in each level or the absurd design of some of the bosses. It’s colorful too, with a wide array of level themes and character and enemy models. Odds are you won’t get bored with something new waiting for you at every turn.

The main issue with Gunbird 2 is that it’s full of freemium “bells and whistles" that are more of a hindrance than an upgrade. You’ve seen it all before, multiple muddled currencies to confuse players, daily login bonuses, specific unlock requirements. It’s all there, and oddly meant to squeeze more time out of the sponge than there really is. Because with shmup fans, they’re either going to like the game and keep playing it for their own reward of a high score, or abandon it entirely. Extra items like bomb slots and more bombs is also a similar poor idea.

There really isn’t a middle-ground here given how niche the genre is, and adding in all this fluff is only going to scare away more potential people from experiencing this forgotten classic. Yes, even energy makes an appearance, and with a score-centric game it’s really puzzling.  I have to give it to them though as the main draw — the characters — can mostly be unlocked through traditional, free means.

In an effort to get it up on the western app store it was also hastily translated, so the barriers to entry aren’t ideal either. It’s not unplayable by any means as all of the menus are technically readable, it just won’t convey all the nuances you might need to excel tot he next level.

You’ll know if Gunbird 2 is for you right away. It’s saddening to see a relic of the past coated in so much crust when it had the opportunity to shine as a premium purchase, but it’s something that just about every shmup fan needs to experience at some point — even if it’s just for one clear.

Yes, even more so than usual. There are two main choke points in Street Fighter Puzzle Spirits. First, each round takes up a significant portion of your stamina gauge. Early on, when level-ups are plentiful and bring stamina refills with them, this isn’t a big problem. Once those salad days are over, it’s not uncommon to wipe out your whole meter in three or four rounds. The second big problem is in the difficulty curve. After a gentle tutorial and fairly breezy early set of stages, you’ll hit your first serious boss in the form of Ryu. Unless you take some time to grind up in earlier fights, you probably won’t be able to beat him. When you finally overcome him, the same pattern emerges, again and again. A few reasonable fights against generic goons followed by a somewhat silly boss that has you running away to lick your wounds and grind.

So why on earth should any Street Fighter fan put up with this nonsense? Well, it’s a really enjoyable game at its core. Rather than having you manipulate pieces to make matches on the board, you simply touch a piece to clear away all adjacent pieces of the same color. This creates a spirit of that color. If you can match that spirit with another similarly colored spirit, you’ll create a rainbow piece. Match that piece with another rainbow piece, and you’ll enter a hyper combo mode. In this mode, you have to clear pieces while a clock ticks down. Clearing pieces gives you more time, but the catch is that your next match has to take place in the area of the pieces you just cleared. The more matches you can make before time runs out, the more hits you’ll deliver in your next attack. Enabling this mode also helps charge your special moves, which you can tack on to the end of that combo for even more damage.

Pieces come in three colors, which form a sort of rock-paper-scissors triangle of damage and defense. Your fighter will have a default color based on whichever move you’ve put in his or her primary special move slot, but using any special move of a different color will temporarily change your color. So not only do you need to focus on building your combo and hitting all your special moves in time, you’ll also need to consider which order you’re busting those moves out in. It’s advantageous, and sometimes vital, to make sure you end up the color that’s strong against your opponent. Provided you’ve collected enough pieces, you can use your special moves whenever you like, even if you’re not in hyper combo mode. You won’t deal as much damage, but it can be useful simply to change your fighter’s color.

While the hyper combo mode has a timer on it, the rest of the game proceeds in a leisurely turn-based fashion, with your opponent set up to attack after a set number of turns. You can also run out of turns, but realistically, your opponent should be able to knock you out well before that happens. It’s a nice contrast with the frantic hyper combo sections. You need to be very careful about your opponent’s attacks, as they not only knock off a portion of your life bar, but can also mess with the board in a variety of ways. These attacks and the variety of effects they bring to the table help keep each round lively and unpredictable.

Being a sort of puzzle-social RPG hybrid, Street Fighter Puzzle Spirits has just about all of the usual elements of a social RPG. I’ve talked about the stamina system, but it also has an abysmally long download on first start-up, a random pull system for special moves, a friend system, and so on. You have to be online while playing, as well. The inventory limit on special moves is quite strict, and with the way the game hands out low-grade moves to you like candy, you’ll probably hit it quickly. Premium currency can increase the size, but if you’ve played a lot of these games before you’ll likely think to go straight to the fusion. Well, there’s no joy here, because you need a ridiculous amount of coins to even do a low-level fusion. It’s one of the many ways the economy is broken in this game, most of which can conveniently be done away with by opening your wallet.

It’s particularly bothersome here because the mechanics of the game work so well. I think the set-up in Street Fighter Puzzle Spirits might actually do a better job of conveying the fast-paced kinetic action of a fighting game better than Puzzle Fighter does. But it’s chained to one seriously heavy iron ball, and I’m not sure most people are going to want to deal with that. There are other things I could pick at, like the shortage of actual Street Fighter characters, the cheap-looking animation, or the overly-busy UI, but the truth is that all of those things are minor quibbles next to the mean difficulty curve, the unforgiving stamina system, and the overall approach to monetization that powers them.

Plants passively buff your hearts, fish must be tapped manually to collect their rewards, and said artifacts grant spells that can be triggered manually (read: abilities that allow you to accrue more hearts). There isn’t a whole lot of nuance to how you approach Abyssrium, but seeing your world grow as you play brings me a certain feeling of accomplishment that many other clickers can’t match.

There’s also a few activities thrown in for good measure, like randomly appearing treasure chests, or a quest reward for taking a picture of a fish. It mixes things up just enough where something is lurking around the corner. But it never really gets too crazy, as you’re still performing the same actions over and over, no matter how far you progress. Some of the fish start to blend together after a while (even if you can reunite most of the crew from Finding Nemo), as do the plants jutting out the side of the rock.

Having a 3D-enabled view and a free camera setting is fun for a bit, but are mostly smoke and mirror effects, distracting you from the shallowness of the gameplay loop.
As is customary with these types of games, Abyssrium is a free download with IAP involved, all the way up to the dreaded $99.99 packs. It’s intended to prey on your need to progress further without having to wait, but I suggest doing just that, because the rewards will come. Clocking in at roughly 100 gems (premium currency) per $1, you can still earn them by completing in-game achievements at a slow, but steady pace. Clearing goals like unlocking a certain number of fish or tapping a specific number of times will grant you gems, all of which have multiple tiers.

So even if you’re itching to try out a premium item or spell, over time you’ll have the opportunity to just unlock it for yourself. Again it’s a sluggish endeavor if multiple items catch your eye, but I haven’t felt the need to spend anything outside of tests for this particular assessment.

My only big hangup is that the game requires you to watch a video before opening a chest. As short as it may be (some only last roughly 10 seconds), it feels like an unnecessary step, and a way to turn people off from the game entirely. You can also watch videos for a heart or gem injection, but since that menu off on its own island in the UI somewhere it’s less intrusive.

The soothing soundtrack and beautiful watercolors tie into the central theme of relaxation for Abyssrium, even with some minor monetization headaches. No, it’s not something you’re going to necessarily get addicted to or want to show all your friends. But if you’re the type of person who loves looking at aquariums, give it a look.

That’s a neat hook. Even the physical traits of the characters will be passed down to their children, though they all look pretty odd. Your legacy extends to more than just your children, as well. You can build structures that will last for generations, though like all things, they’ll eventually degrade as well. You’re not the only one hard at work, however. In addition to the monsters you’ll run into on the map, there are tons of other adventurers working their way through their lives. It makes for a crowded map most of the time, and it’s hard to go more than a few steps without bumping into something that wants to fight. Losing a battle doesn’t usually result in a game over, but instead knocks five years off of your character’s life. You don’t want to go down in too many battles, but a loss here and there can be tolerated.

That aspect might make it seem like Hero Generations is an easy-going roguelite, and in a lot of ways it is. There’s an awful lot to learn, but you can choose the pace at which you want to learn it. If you want to spend the first few games bopping around the map, smacking creatures in the head, and marrying the first decent candidate you see, you can do that. You’ll probably have some fun with it. At a certain point, though, you’ll want to get serious, and that’s when you’ll have to start managing things very carefully. Though your lifespan runs around 70 years, a good portion of those years will have you in a state too weak to handle most enemies. Unless you really luck out with your genes and prepare the proper buildings, the first part of your life and the last part will see you barely able to defeat anything, making walking about an especially dangerous proposition for older folks.

Since each move consumes some of your lifespan, you need to plan your course very carefully. Do you want to spend some time powering up your attack to take down a boss? Would you rather build up some gold or valuable items that can be passed down to the next generation? Or will you focus on fame, which usually gives you the best choices for mates? Without spoiling too much, there’s an event that takes place after a certain number of generations that you need to be ready to take care of, so you can’t just trundle around with no purpose forever. I’m starting to sound like my grandfather here.

Children get to carry forward some random bonuses from their parents. They’ll also get some other benefits, such as boosted fame, items, and gold, depending on how many generations into the game you are. You can hedge the bets a little by building certain structures prior to retiring, but you’re always going to be at the mercy of randomness to some extent. While the map doesn’t change in any big ways from generation to generation, the whole thing will be fogged over when you start a new generation, too. Gee, mom, you couldn’t have drawn me a map or something? You’ll have to spend the first bit of each life getting your bearings again, which is just as well since you probably won’t be able to kill anything until you’re an adult. You’ll also want to sort out your plan for the next generation early on. Waiting until you’re middle-aged before at least figuring out a potential mate is playing with fire.

This gives the game a flow all of its own. You’ll spend the first half of any given character’s life building up their strength and resources, and the last half setting things up for the next character. You’re getting a sort of persistence with your character that many other rogue-inspired games don’t offer, but the price is that you must always spend a good portion of your time setting things up for the next play. I like it when a game forces me to approach it with fresh tactics, and Hero Generations certainly demands that.

That said, just because something is new, it doesn’t mean it’s good. I can’t decide if the core gimmick of Hero Generations is the best thing about it or the worst. The novel strategies required are a good thing, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t become rote after several generations. I’m sure you could read all kinds of philosophy into this, but childhood and the twilight years just aren’t very fun. You’ll mostly be repeating the same actions in these phases, with the fresh meat only found in the middle years. The extremely limited inventory can also be quite vexing. You can only hold two things at a time, and that includes any weapon or defensive items you want to carry. In a vacuum, a character spending their entire life questing for a single treasure sounds kind of cool, but when you’ve got a relatively small number of generations before the big show, it’s almost more trouble than it’s worth.

I also really don’t enjoy the combat. Each battle lasts for one turn regardless of the outcome. A random number from zero to you and your opponent’s maximum power will be drawn, and whoever gets the higher number wins. The loser sheds five years, and if it’s enough to kill them, they’ll be removed from the map. Otherwise, they’ll get bumped to an adjacent space, where they might well be in your way again for another kicking. Technically, it’s possible to lose to even the weakest of foes if the random number generator doesn’t like you, so once again, be sure you can afford to lose before you get into any battle. There’s an awful lot of luck at play here, and given just how much fighting you’ll likely be doing, it’s disappointing there isn’t more to do here but pray for a good roll.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention just how opaque the game is in the early runnings. There’s a tutorial here that barely scratches the surface, and if you’re the sort that is turned off by games where you spend the first hour or so trying to untangle knots, Hero Generations will probably frustrate you more than anything. Once you understand how it all works, it’s relatively easy to play, but the game really ought to do a better job of explaining itself in its tutorial. I mean, that’s kind of the point of having one of those. The interface does a decent job given all the functions it needs to accomplish, but it’s also a little on the complicated side, so again, come ready to learn if you plan on coming.

Hero Generations assuredly has a feel of its own, and although it’s occasionally a double-edged sword, the generational aspect of the game does present interesting challenges and tough choices. Its odd mix of complexity and a moderately low level of difficulty make for a confused package, but I could see many people taking to it for a little while. I enjoyed Hero Generations for a few runs, but I got tired of it all faster than I thought I would. The weak combat system quickly became dull and even occasionally frustrating, an issue compounded by just how much of it there is in any given session. I’ll give the game points for a clever idea and solid construction, but it’s hard to recommend it with too much zeal. I’d say that if you like the sound of the gimmick, you’ll probably get some fun out of the game.

Eden is a building game, devoid of some of the annoying tendencies associated with clickers and other devolved, similar titles. Your job is to start with a single settlement, with a group of people surrounding around a campfire, and build from there. Essential resources like water are paramount, as well as creating new tech trees by way of additional buildings like a carpentry hut. You’ve pretty much seen all of it before, but the nice serene package that Eden presents makes it a much easier pill to swallow.

All of the lush green landscapes are a joy to look at, as is the misty fog that surrounds unexplored areas, beckoning you to come in. All of the icons, while basic, are handy and easy to identify, like droplets of water, axes and other tools, and piles of wood. It gets a little muddled once you get into specifics like “fence posts" and “beams," but it’s something most people will pick up during an extended session. Like most slower paced builders that don’t rely on any sort of twitch combat element, Eden works wonderfully on a touch device. UI buttons are usually big enough to press without accidentally selecting other errant options, and it’s very easy to see what’s going on, from the macro element of the camp itself to the citizens walking about.

I used the phrases serene and slow for a reason — this is not a particularly exciting experience. It’s a chill one for sure, but after a few hours of flipping around the screen and not having anything to do for moments at a time, it can get a bit old. There are no real major “hazards" to account for, which is partially responsible for its dull moments. Take the Sim City series for example — which features natural disasters — you’d have to always be on your toes at all times to figure out how you’re going to respond to any kinks in your perfect plan. But with Eden, there’s no predators, no antagonistic sets of rules to contend with outside of occasional annoyances like a thunderstorm, which can be patched up in seconds with a few taps, or a changing of the seasons, which merely requires a few altered clicks.

It can get even rougher after several hours of play, where players are waiting for resources to spawn — vital resources, mind — which impedes progress, sometimes coupled by buggy spawns. It’s not the end of the world as I ended up doing other things (you can move on to other community tasks/challenges if they’re bugged), or tended to other elements of my settlement, but it’s pacing problems like that, that start to make it feel like a clicker. That said, it does feel refreshing when Eden doesn’t explicitly tell you how to do something, and allows you to figure it out on your own. It’s never too taxing, but appreciated all the same.

Even though Eden is basically an advertisement for the show (though admittedly, very thinly veiled as I didn’t even realize that until I had discovered multiple discussions about the game online), it still has microtransactions. The good news is that they’re relatively painless and can be ignored, as the game is entirely playable without them. If you wish though you can spring for increments of $1.99 in premium currency all the way up to $39.99, which basically just speed up the proceedings a bit. Note, however, that they won’t magically add in new unpredictable aforementioned elements, so this is mainly if you really enjoy Eden and want to progress faster.

Eden: The Game is a special type of project that won’t appeal to everyone. If you’re looking to feel a rush pretty much at all times, battling danger left and right while you build your new utopia, directly interacting with other hostile players, look elsewhere.  Everyone else will find a little bit of respite, even if the overall system could stand for a few upgrades and new scenarios down the line.

Well, let’s soldier on. First of all, this game’s story is almost entirely unrelated to any of the other Asdivine games so far. There are a couple of cheeky references to Asdivine Hearts, but for the most part, this game stands alone. Since it predates the other Asdivine games released in English by years, that makes sense, but I just wanted to make that clear. Our hero this time is a bandit with a heart of gold named Harvey, who gets pinched by the law while on a job. While he’s cooling his feet in prison, he meets a young girl who claims to be the princess of the realm. She’s been locked up for impersonating royalty, and the only member of the castle staff who can vouch for her appears to have taken a full dose of evil pills this morning. Harvey’s boss decides that they’re going to help her out. Princess Amelia is naive and sweet, while Harvey is cynical and savvy. You can probably fill in most of the dialogue between the two in your head right now.

Within a couple of hours, you’ll have your party rounded out with another two characters. One of the two, Lucile, brings with her a Blue Magic-style system of learning moves that turns out to be one of the more enjoyable parts of the game. Apart from that, Asdivine Cross is typical of other recent EXE-Create releases. The battles are turn-based affairs with a sort of limit break proxy that you can pop every once in a while for extra damage. You can chain together combos for extra damage, and choose from a variety of special skills and magic. Outside of battle, the weapon crafting system that has been in the last several games from this developer returns, essentially unchanged. It brings the ticket system with it where you can draw random weapons in exchange for certain items dropped by enemies. Apart from gear, your input into each character’s development is quite minimal.

I guess what I’m saying is that you shouldn’t expect too much from the gameplay mechanics here. It’s all done competently, and as with other games in the Asdivine series, there’s a lot to dig into here if you’re inclined to spend extra time after the story’s finished. But as solid as it is, it’s also wholly unremarkable. The same can be said for the story itself. It’s fun and the localization is generally quite good, but we’ve been around the block more than once with EXE-Create and their Moonlighting-style “odd couple" romances. The plot is a slightly different generic plot from the last few games, but it adheres carefully enough to genre tropes that you will assuredly see every single turn and twist coming. Even the banter between characters, usually the high point of EXE-Create’s games, is a little too familiar overall.

Asdivine Cross is available as two different apps. The premium version gives you a chunk of points at an effective discount and has ads disabled by default. The free version has ads, and if you want anything from the special premium shop, you’ll have to grind out all the points on your own for it. That shop contains the usual assortment of cheat items, none of which are required to beat the game. I’d go so far as to say that buying some of the doublers actually breaks the game, curbing much of the fun involved in battles. In any case, veteran RPG players will want to start on at least the hard difficulty setting if they want to encounter anything with any teeth at all. The lower difficulty settings are good for those who just want to enjoy the story, as you can more or less auto-battle your way through all but a few encounters.

It’s always hard to score games like Asdivine Cross. If you’re new to Kemco and EXE-Create’s games, you’ll probably really enjoy it. It’s a well-built JRPG, if not a terribly exciting one, and certainly doesn’t do anything poorly. The lively localization, familiar mechanics, and bright visuals help the game go down quite smoothly. On the other hand, if you’ve played any of the other EXE-Create/Kemco releases this year, don’t hope for this one to change things up much. That’s going to fine for some, particularly since decent traditional JRPGs are getting to be a rarity on iOS, but for those who have burnt out on the concept, Asdivine Cross doesn’t make many new arguments.

Swipe in any direction, and a raindrop will zoom across at your chosen trajectory until it collides with something. Sound familiar? That’s because it is, and it’s something we’ve been doing since the early days of MS-DOS. But like most clever projects, the developers manage to put a spin on the formula and make it their own. Very early on you’ll be introduced to multiple droplets (which can conveniently be propelled by flicking near each object), and it never really lets up from there.

Things start to get a little crazier when you add in doors that can only be entered once before they shut, multiple color-coded gates and objects, and a screen full of hazards. It all reminded me of Chip’s Challenge, a classic PC game, and that’s a compliment. There’s a lot to micromanage nearly at all times, and the amount of concepts to keep track up ramps up very quickly. That’s mostly a good thing because the game constantly keeps you interested with new ideas.

Those ideas, however, aren’t always fleshed out as well as they need to be, and can be fleeting in nature. Despite the moniker everything isn’t really all that chill when the game doesn’t properly introduce a new idea it really wants you to learn, and then promptly takes it away a few levels later just as you were getting acquainted with it. Having said that, most of the ideas are explained by way of a short text burst at the top of the screen, so you’ll have some idea of what to do. If that wasn’t stressful enough there’s a move counter at the corner of the screen, showing you the ideal par for every course.

I’m actually fine with that, as its essentially the developer’s way to explaining how to “best" approach every stage. It isn’t too taxing to finish a stage with a bare-bones lengthy approach, but you will spend hours trying to formulate a way to clear par. Adding extra coin incentives (more on coins in a moment) like achievements for surpassing goals such as earning multiple “perfects" is a nice touch, and a welcome bit of positive reinforcement.

One thing that I’m really at odds with though is the game’s style. Visually, it looks like a muted flash game, devoid of any real personality. It’s functional yes, in that swiping works exactly how it’s supposed to and I’ve had no issues with crashes and the like, but it doesn’t differentiate itself from basically anything else. By that same token, the score is fitting and moving.

It reminds me of some of the best work on the Minecraft soundtrack, with the soothing sounds of its piano track. The sound effects, especially the little droplet noises when picking up objects, is equally relaxing. There’s also a miniature story of sorts (if you can call it that) by way of inspirational messages, which are rote but can ultimately be ignored. It would have been nice if they were little more interesting, but since they’re not accompanied by an obnoxious forced narrative, all is forgiven.

Unfortunately, Quell Zen does offer a few IAP choices that sort of cheapen the experience. At $3.99 it’s a hefty sum given the extreme competition on the market, but you can also spring for in-game currency (used to unlock later levels), a skeleton key (that unlocks every level), a jewel detector (that makes it easier to find items), and a “super rewind" feature that lets you take back five moves per level. It’s a little out of control, and the latter three especially should have been baked into the premium version.

Don’t expect it to blow your mind, but if you want a well balanced puzzler, Quell Zen is your huckleberry. It could use a lot of polish but that’s mostly from a visual perspective, because the brain teasing elements and accessible controls are intact.

Despite having the words ‘Roguelike’ and ‘RPG’ right in the app name, Dead Shell hardly resembles either and doesn’t really scratch either itch. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This game puts you in sci-fi facilities and installations that are overrun with demons, monsters, and undead. I noticed an immediate Doom vibe before I even read the app description, which wears its inspiration on its sleeve. We are on a Doom-4 Class Planet, it turns out, called Plutonia. A very remote colony, which I guess means it’s entirely up to the 8 mercenaries that you’ll eventually unlock to save the day.

The dungeons and the enemies within them are completely randomized in this game. You can use credits to re-roll a dungeon if it seems like it will be too hard at incrementally higher prices. Once you enter, the layout of the dungeon stands before you. Your character is nowhere to be seen, and battles have a quasi-first-person perspective. Everything happens at the same time per turn. When you tap to attack an enemy, you will be attacked. The white part of everyone’s health bar indicates how much damage they’ll be taking, though it is possible to exceed that amount with a critical hit. When you kill an enemy, assuming they aren’t a ghost of some kind, their gory remains will be left behind, and you can tap those to potentially reveal items. But collecting items and reloading your gun counts as part of your turn, so don’t take any damage you don’t have to. You do automatically reload after every fight, which lead to me not even realizing I had to reload for the first 20 or so levels.

After you reach a dungeon’s exit, you’re shown how thoroughly you completed that dungeon. How many rooms you explored, credits you found, and monsters you’ve slain. Early on I made it a point to try to clear everything, but as you progress you’ll find that isn’t always possible. You’ll also find that there seems to be no penalty whatsoever for jumping right into the exit as soon as you can. You’ll miss out on some credits, which are used to upgrade your mercenaries, but it’s usually not very much. After each mission you’ll be given three random rewards and must blindly choose one. Sometimes these will be three of the same item, like the same small stack of credits, so the random generation of these needs some work.

Actually, the RNG (Random Number Generation) of the entire game needs some work. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock chests. These are your bread and butter. You need chests to unlock more mercenaries, more enemies, more areas, and more weapons. You’ll also get ammo and credit dumps which are always nice. It’s possible to run completely out of ammo, so you want as much variety as possible as soon as possible. Eventually you’ll unlock some really tough enemies, such as the Phantom Lord and the Steel Golem. Where I am now, the only way I can possibly beat the golems is with a specific mercenary whose skill is to take away an enemies buffs and damage resistances.

Each mercenary has three aspects of their character to upgrade. Each one can upgrade their health, each one has proficiency with a specific weapon type, giving bonus damage, and each one has a special skill with a cooldown that you can shorten. These special skills are what really set them apart. The starting mercenary can turn every item in a battle screen, including gore and other items, into a stack of 50 credits. The shotgun wielding commando can freeze enemies for a few turns. The medic wields a chainsaw and has a self-heal. The assault trooper uses huge machine guns and has a special attack that deals huge damage to all enemies in a room. So on and so forth. It’s the delta scout that can bypass an enemy’s resistances, which is just so powerful later on.

Any mercenary can technically carry any weapon in addition to their melee axe, so you can experiment. It’s possible to get health and damage upgrades for any given mercenary in a chest, so it could be a very long time before you actually unlock them all. Ammo is universal across every character and matching weapon type. You will get duplicates of weapons that you can sell for 300 credits or so. The main way to get extra chests and credits is through the quest system. This is your basic rotating 3 mission structure, where you need to kill a certain number of a certain monster, collect a certain number of credits, etc.

Here’s the problem with the game. There is very little sense of progression, and what progression there is takes a long time to really impact the game. You unlock random monsters, but many of them are no more a threat than any other. You unlock new areas, but these are only cosmetic color swaps and new battle backgrounds for your random dungeons. The main sense of progress comes from unlocking new mercenaries and upgrading them, but this is a slow process. It would help so much if I could see all available unlocks and my progress for them. The chests that you find give you all items in card form. It would be great to have a screen of cards that are slowly filled in, letting me check weapon and enemy stats even if I don’t currently have that weapon in my arsenal or if I’m not currently about to face that enemy. There are no boss fights or milestones to speak of. It all just starts to feel super pointless.

You have the ability to send your ship out for supplies, and upgrading the ship increases the available slots for supplies. This is your way out if you run completely out of ammo. I upgraded my ship twice and sent it out. After a 6 hour timer counted down, all I got was some ammo. I didn’t even know how much ammo. That’s my other issue with this game. It’s very minimalist, which I can appreciate, but I want more information. All communication is done through bars and icons. I wish things were spelled out a bit more clearly. You can infer everything over time and figure it out, but still. I upgraded my ship two more times, by the way. It still takes 6 hours to come back. Despite being a premium game, this sure feels like a freemium one. Timers and chests with completely randomized loot and all that.

There are occasionally randomized events. A dungeon might have been a supply cache with loads of crates, or the scene of a massacre with loads of gore to squish into items, or the scene will have been flooded with poison. Early on I found an exo-skeleton with twin machine guns that hit all enemies at once, and it was glorious, but that was over 50 levels ago and I never saw it again. This game has some shining moments, but they pale in comparison to the lack of stakes. Did I mention that this “roguelike” has no real death? There is no penalty for death. You are given a game over screen, but no progress is reset and there are no setbacks at all, except maybe some wasted ammo. This made me think of The Earth Has Fallen (Free), which was a cool looking little game that had you defend the earth from waves of aliens, but you could watch an ad to infinitely respawn with no penalty. Why even? With RPG elements that mainly involve super small cooldown reductions or an extra point or two of damage with a specific weapon, you can see why I said this barely feels like a roguelike or an RPG earlier.

I generally love the presentation of this game. I still haven’t gotten sick of that one looping song they have. The idea of soldiers and horrifying demons as chibi little pixel art characters is rather appealing, and the art and use of color is all very nice. Sound effects are quite varied too. I understand why there couldn’t be perma-death. The chances that you’ll get stuck in a dungeon with super tough mobs is just too high. This is what happens when progress is so random. Heck, you might see an icon of a lowly spider, and see that there are 3 enemies in his group, but once you start the fight he has two steel golems with him and you’re just done. There is potential here, and I don’t regret buying this game, but I’d recommend holding off on checking it out until there are some tweaks to this crazy RNG and progression.