Home » Articles and Reviews by 'Christian Valentin'
A Steel Media round-up for the week of June 11th
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 challenging and atmosphere Feist. Featuring "spikes, physics, and grisly deaths" in spades, the games is praised for its unique take on familiar ideas, clever mechanics and level design from a simple set of controls, and reflex-testing challenges that also turn each combat encounter into a fast-paced puzzle. Over on Pocket Gamer, Jon Mundy takes a look at the companion app God of War: Mimir's Vision, which is most useful as a lore comendium for players to delve into. If you're intrigued by the…
Pocket Run PoolCommand & Conquer: Rivals is fast-paced multiplayer strategy headed to iOS and Android
Command & Conquer: Rivals is an upcoming mobile distillation of the classic PC strategy series, combining the series' sci-fi warfare and setting with a fast-paced touch-friendly design for iOS and Android. Inspired by games like Clash Royale, Rivals pits players against eachother on the battlefield, tasking each with placing turrets and defenses and unleashing their ground forces to overcome their opponents and take control of a central nuclear missile hub. While you consruct facilities and support structures with your precious Tiberium resources, controlling your infrantry and armored vehicles and mechs is more involved, letting you direct units with taps as their forward movemt…
First-person dino survival game Ark: Survival Evolved makes its way to iOS and Android
Among the popular survival games, Ark: Survival Evolved was unique with its dinosaur-ridden landscapes (among other creatures), and now the base-builiding, dimosaur-heavy game is released on mobile. Alone or with friends in a tribe, your journey ttrough Ark's world is one of resorce gathering, crafting stylish gear for your character, and avoiding or fighting the dozens of dinosaur types. From wooden spears to rocket launchers, your arsenal is vast; equally so are the various biomes, the plethora of animals to battle (or tame), and the towering reinforced basses you can build to protect against the dinosaurs lurking outside. Those creatures may often be monstrous opponents, bu…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Manowar
Blend a swaying ship, cannons, and a colorful assortment of cannonballs together and you'd get the tricky and satisfying puzzle game that is Manowar. Trailer Each level of Manowar is the cutaway of a drifting ship filled with various platforms, barriers, and cannonballs, lined with cannons. The goal is simple: tilt the ship in the right ways that maneuver the cannonballs into the properly cannons and fire them into the surrounding ocean. The twist is that each time you fire a cannon also results in the remaining cannonballs to bounce into the air; this mechanical quirk lets you bounce cannonballs between platforms or even into position balacing atop other cannonballs. Then direction-spe…
Slice shapes with precision in puzzler sequel Ultra Sharp
1Button's history is one of cleverly minimalist puzzle games and challenging arcade games; Ultra Sharp, the sequel to the oriignal Super Sharp, adds another round of physics-based challenges to that roster of titles. Much like its predecessor, Ultra Sharp presents you with dozens of stages constructed from colorful shapes, precisely placed for you to slice apart and have collapse, tumble, and fall in ways that solve puzzles. You may have to cut shapes in the best way so the pieces touch hard-to-reach stars or drop a cube into a specific area, among other objectives, but each level is a test of predicting the domino effect of shapes in motion. SImply planning your slices so shapes fall as…
Unorthodox multiplayer game One Hour One Life is headed to iOS and Android
In some ways, One Hour One Life is familiar. It has all the hallmarks of the popular survival genre: crafting, gathering resources, building shelters, other players running rampant. But that title describes its most unique attribute and secret to its generational pacing. "One Hour One Life" says it quite plainly: you have one life and it lasts an hour. You start as a defenseless baby and die at a ripe old 60, sixty minutes later with each passing minute equaling one year of life from infant to child and so on. As an infant, you must trust and rely on older players to protect you, while as you grow older, you must choose to protect and care for new baby players. Each passing generation exp…
Unique fantasy RPG Six Ages releases on June 28th for iOS
First teased back in March, developer A Sharp has revealed that their ambitious RPG Six Ages is releasing quite soon, heading to the App Store later this month. Six Ages is the long awaited successor to King of Dragon Pass, set in the same fantasy but following a different tribe (this one being a horse-riding Mongol-esque culture), offering a number of refinements and improvements, and a plethora of new text to read and myths to delve into. Dragon Pass players look like they'll feel right at home with Six Ages' panel of advisors giving you guidance on matters from farming to warfare or the delicate balance of resource management, tribal expansion, and reacting to the myriad events that ca…
The Elder Scrolls: Blades brings first-person RPG action to mobile this September
First person RPGs such as The Quest and Ravensword have all attempted to bring the expansive adventures of titles like Elder Scrolls to mobile, but now Bethesda's famed franchise is headed to iOS in its familar form designed to best suit touchscreen, through the upcoming Elder Scrolls: Blades. A member of the Blades order, you retuen home to find the place in ruins. With simple touch controls, your warrior ventures out into the open environments and dungeons, gathering loot, earning new skills, and gaining the resources to rebuild your destroyed home town. With money and resourced earned, you can expande and customize your town, or test your skills in the Arena through one-versus-one…
A Steel Media round-up for the week of June 4th
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 bullet hell shoot-em-up Blazefury, that makes its own mark by mixing the shmup style with the idle tapper genre. While not immediately compelling, the vibrant aesthetic and upgrading mechanics make Blazefury surprisingly enjoyable as a unique shooter. Over on Pocket Gamer, Emily Sowden provides a rundown of the games that won at Apple Design Awards, the eclectic group of winners including the desert snowboarding Alto's Odyysey, touching romance Florence, artful puzzler Frost, grim platformer I…
Only When Howling offers a personal narrative through interactive art piece
Mobile is no stranger to experience art piece games, from Plug & Play to the recent G30. Only While Howling's vibrant art style and causal design promises a personal and human narrative. Only While Howling revolves around three characters, delving into their pysche through colorful interactive vignettes that explore each person's connections, values, struggles and sacrifices. Gameplay-wise, it's very much a causal experience designed to propel the story forward, taps and drags that cause the environments of its various illustrations to react. From psychedelic panels to scenes of domestic life, Only While Howling explores a vast gamut of imagery and themes, all told through animat…
Nitrome's latest release In The Dog House is a tile-sliding canine puzzler
Nitrome has a long history of colorful pixel art aesthetic and simple-to-play but cleverly-designed puzzle games, and In The Dog House is a fun addition to that roster. This new tile-sliding puzzler injects a touch of spatial manipulation into the familiar formula. When you're away, your canine pets are apparently manuvering through room-flipping puzzles; In The Dog House lets you move rooms around house interiors, reordering them to create paths to the exit. While these challenges start out as simply creating hallways or stairs upward, In The Dog introduces more mechanics, from cats you need to avoid to tiles you can rotate to create new paths. As you solve the game's 50-plus puzz…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Yellow & Red
Bart Bonte's library of games is one of weird, quirky, tacitle puzzles, often with a focus on experimentation to discover rules and solutions. His two color-themed games Yellow and Red fit this design perfectly, offering myriad mininalist challenges. Both games feature 50 stages, all aesthetically themed as a black background overlaid by a puzzle in the games' corresponding color. Your goal is to fill the screen with a single color, but how you accomplish this goal is what makes Yellow and Red such enjoyable experiences. Every stage features a distinct rule, to be discovered and understand, to solve a puzzle; through experimental taps and swipes and observation, soon that rule or pattern…
Make Squares offers a clever twist on classic Tetris, available on iOS and Android
You know how to play Tetris: tetromino pieces falling from above, fitting them together to make rows, and so on. Make Squares takes those familiar pieces and delivers a unique variant that turns your understanding of the pieces and their relationship on its head. As you've probably guessed from the title, Make Squares tasks you with combining pieces into squares, and manipulating your growing central structure to catch falling tetrominoes. Most importantly, instead of rotating pieces, you rotate the larger structure, forcing you to consider orientation and how future pieces will dovetail with different sides. This change turns the familiar feeling of Tetris into a new spatial ch…
Sandbox racer Off The Road receives a gameplay trailer ahead of its July release
The upcoming Off The Road looks to capture the big jumps and hill climbing of arcade offroad racing with a sandbox approach that lets you freely switch between various vehicles, in this unique racer game launching next month on iOS and Android. From speedboat to jeep to big rig to helicopter, Off The Road teases a number of different vehicles to control across its open maps, Moving between vehicles in first person, you can choose them at your leisure, simply racing freely over hills or testing your skills in challenges. Coins to collect and tricky missions like cargo hauls or narrow speedways snaking through mountaintops supplement Off The Road's sandbox design. Off The Road will b…
Paperbark promises an illustrated adventure following a sleepy wombat when it releases on June 21st
iOS has been home to more than a few relaxing, unorthodox adventure games, like the follktales of Burly Men At Sea and the text-based design of Pry. Paperbark looks to follow in those footsteps with charming story of a wombat in Australia. Guiding the stumbling gait of a cute wombat, Paperbark tasks you with exploring the underbrush and wilderness of Australia. Described as a "short story", this adventure presents its environments in an detailed watercolor aesthetic inspired by iconic landscape paintings, as you travel to new locations through the hazy summer heat. Complementing the natural journey is an interactive library detailing the Australian Bush, teaching players about the…
