Home » Articles and Reviews by 'Christian Valentin'
Hidden Gem of the Week: Trigger
Trigger is a frantic, colorful, same-screen multiplayer game that adds the physics-based wackiness of Wrestle Jump and similar games to top-down shooter action. A button in the corner of the screen lets players control their tiny tank. simultaneously rotating your vehicle and firing a projectile. This simple control scheme imbues the hectic game with a skillful element that priortizes positioning and timing, as you evade enemy shots and plan out your movements. Various power-ups appear through the arenas, granting you the abilities to release mines and let your projectiles ricochet. Getting hit isn't the end of your game though; instead you find yourself on foot, forced to race back to an…
TriggerGrapple with quirky comedic physics in Rowdy Physics [Review]
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Break apart increasingly complex jigsaw grids in relaxing puzzler Unpuzzle
Reminiscent of games like Hook and the recent Up Left Out, Unpuzzle takes the block-sliding puzzler and challenges you to unmake each mess of blocks while managing a number of different mechanics. Unpuzzle starts simply, asking you only to slingshot blocks off the main jigsaw structure. The initial rules means you can’t release blocks if their path is...blocked or if they‘re connected to more than one piece. But Unpuzzle quickily begins introducing new mechanics that build upon that early ruleset. Soon you’re dealing with blocks that require a certain amount of pieces to be removed before you can interact with them, blocks that can only slide in certain directions, bloc…
Build your dream metropolis when Pocket City arrives on iOS and Android on July 31st
Mobile has had fair share of city builders, from the skyscraper-based Project Highrise to the card-game hybrid Concrete Jungle, but the ambitious Pocket City looks to be condense the familiar complexity of SimCity and its style of games into an iOS/Android-friendly package. In classic genre fashion, your god’s eye mayoral view places all the functions of a city at your fingertips, from designating residential and industrial zones, to managing taxes, to constructing recreation areas and developing parks, to handling crime and dealing with disasters. Zoning will be crucial to keeping your citizens happy and your city functioning, while completing missions for different citizens…
Widow's Sky is a gorgeous sci-fi adventure coming to mobile later this year
Widower's Sky follows a father and son across an otherworldly sci-fi landscape, in an isometric adventure that blends platforming, puzzles, and survival elements, slated to release on mobile devices in the fall. Leaping through portals, from one alien world to another, you must wield a bow and your evasive dash ability to hunt wildlife and manuver around aggressive laser beam-firing machines. A narrative divided between past and future slowly converges as you explore different enviroments - from dense forests to elegant ruins - and leap over massive gaps between towering architecture, all while collecting food to keep your son alive. Widower's Sky doesn't have a concrete release date yet…
A Steel Media round-up for the week of July 16th
Here’s another weekly round-up of news, previews, and features from Pocket Gamer, 148Apps, and the rest of our sister sites. On our Youtube page, James Gilmour reviews the superheroic strategy RPG Teeny Titans Go Figure. Overflowing with charm, heart, and whimsy, the sequel is praised for its humorous tone, ease of play, wealth of content, and nuanced yet easy-to-grasp mechanics. Over on Pocket Gamer, Emily Snowden presents reader impressions of the recent point-n-click release Isoland 2. Generally, the quirky world design and aesthetic is praised as distinctive and unique, but that the gameplay is quite hard, to the point of potentially needing pencil and paper to solve…
Motorsport Manager 3 gives you more control over its Formula 1 racing simulation than ever before [Review]
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Galak-Z Variant Mobile brings the frenetic space shooter to iOS and Android
Originally released in 2015 for PC and PS4, Galak-Z Variant Mobile, as the name suggests, is a modified port designed to work for touchscreens, letting mobile gamers enjoy Galak-Z's evasive combat and relentless enemies, both mechanical and alien. Perhaps the most critical aspects of Galak-Z that seperates it from other hectic shoot-em-ups is its combination of stealth and transforming mech actions. Enemy ships have line of sight and your ship makes different amounts of noise based on movement, so you can flank enemies and ambush them from behind for extra damage or just hide to avoid a particularly tough foe you can't defeat yet. Or you could transform into your mech form to deflec…
Dere Evil Exe is a sinister quirky hybrid of retro platformer and surreal horror [Review]
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Hidden Gem of the Week: Super Arc Light
Super Arc Light's premise couldn't be more simple: there's a base in the center of the screen, there's a single turret guarding the entrance's perimeter, and there's an endless wave of geometric enemies approaching. It's a formula as old as Space Invaders, presented here in a slick minimalist style, colorful rounds contrasting against the stark black-and-white battleground. There are no extra modes to unlock, no alternate difficulties, nothing to upgrade. Super Arc Light is pure distilled shmup action. Your turret automatically travels around the base's circular entrance; holding down slows time and fires, while letting go reverses the direction of your rotation. Once you get a feel for t…
Ironhide Studios reveals their next tower defense entry, Kingdom Rush Vengeance
When it comes to tower defense on mobile, the Kingdom Rush series has been at the forefront since the first game's launch in 2011. Vengeance is the latest entry, revealed earlier with a short but vibrant teaser. The teaser doesn't showcase any gameplay, but the signature cartoony aesthetic is certainly returning. The trailer takes us through a number or environments, from scenic villages to icy rivers, treasure-filled dungeon tunnels to dark forests. But the biggest hint of changes in this entry is the omnious figure that graces the trailer's final shot and the tagline of "Join Vez'nan's army!", possibly teasing that we'll be playing as the bad guys in Vengeance. Kingdom Rush Vengeance d…
Dice and dungeon crawling abound in Fighting Fantasy Legends [Review]
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Blast through the monsters of the deep in aquatic shmup Earth Atlantis [Review]
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A Steel Media round-up for the week of July 9th
Here’s another weekly round-up of news, previews, and features from Pocket Gamer, 148Apps, and the rest of our sister sites. On our Youtube page, James Gilmour does a hands-on preview of the new puzzler The Eyes of Ara. A port of a 2016 PC game, Eyes of Ara is reminiscent of The Room 3, presenting you with a mysterious mansion to explore and solve tactile puzzles. Over on Pocket Gamer, Kieran Robertson previews the upcoming Holedown, the next arcade game from the creator of Twofold Inc and Rymdkapsel. A new variant of the brick-breaker, Holedown challenges you to ricochet balls off numbered tetromino pieces, each bounce subtracted from the piece's number.&…
Challenging puzzler Fracter is now available on iOS and Android
Revealed earlier this year, Fracter is now out on the App Store and Google Play, bringing atmospheric light-based puzzles to mobile gamers. Reminiscent of Limbo, you guide a young hero through a weird and otherworldly shaded realm, filled with abstract architecture and light-emitting structures and shadowy threats. From a central hub, Fracter has you traveling through doors to isometric puzzle environments, where twisitng paths and staircases take you to tricky areas where manipulating light and shadow is your key to solving the game's challenges. With swipes, you can rotate towers of lights and remove coverings to release lights; with an onscreen joystick, you can run or sneak past figur…
