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Lanterns Review
[Lanterns was featured as the Mini-review for the 5th of October, 2012 Friday News Wrap-Up] The Lantern Festival that ends most Chinese New Year celebrations is a beautiful thing to observe and take part in. There’s something calming about seeing hundreds of softly-lit colored orbs tethered on or strung-up between buildings, or better yet, floating free in the sky. Lanterns by Big Time Games recreates the zen-like relaxation of the festival by using the already familiar match-3…
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Jumpster™ Review
If there's one thing Jumpster has going for it, it's that for most of the levels, eye-absorbing would be a very apt description. The planet Okadia is definitely full of eye candy, but sadly this is not going to help Jumpster acquire all the fuel cells needed to power his ship off this lush and lavish planet. The core of the experience here is a physics puzzler that is designed around the freemium model. A catapulting drag of the finger will cause Jumpster to jump along the arc provide…
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Save The Puppies PREMIUM Review
Sometimes you just have to solve your own problems. If a dogcatcher is going to capture all the puppies in your area, instead of trying to deal with the issue on human terms, you should just rescue the puppies yourself (as they have been dropped all over town in their cages). How might a lowly sausage dog complete such an undertaking? By eating sausages to grow to a sufficient enough length to solve puzzles of course! Save the Puppies uses an on-screen d-pad on the bottom left o…
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Sugar Kid Review
Cute protagonist? Check. Three-star system to unlock content? Check. Physics-based gameplay system? Triple check. It’s almost a recipe for mundanity by now, but A Crowd of Monsters and Bulkypix have taken the best aspects of these games, paired it with perhaps the most disturbing penalty system I’ve seen in a while and packaged it with quickly unlocking content that scales to your skill level with uncanny precision. This is Sugar Kid, and I don’t think I’ll be…
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Payback² HD - The Battle Sandbox Review
For gamers like myself, the idea of a truly open-ended experience can be daunting - it’s not that I can’t set myself goals and then achieve them, but that I kind of expect that sort of input from the people who made them game. As such the genre has never really appealed; at least not for an extended period of time. Thankfully there’s always Payback^2 by Apex Design, a resurrected iOS GTA-a-like classic that concentrates on bite-sized action-packed missions while still…
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The Last Express Review
In the world of Adventure titles, The Last Express is a sort of right-of-passage, especially as it puts a spin on the usual tropes of the genre by packing them in to a mystery-thriller that plays out in real-time. It should be no surprise that such a concept sprang from the mind of Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, and despite its relative age it remains a shining example of how deeply gameplay and storytelling can be intertwined. You play as Robert Cath, a young doctor thrown…
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Hotel Transylvania Dash Deluxe Review
Playfirst Inc are the creators of Diner Dash, and Cooking Dash, and Hotel Dash... so when they had the license for a game based off the newly released movie Hotel Transylvania, it probably wasn't too much of a leap to expect the release of Hotel Transylvania Dash. This is iPhone sim-management at its simplest, and depending on how you like your mobile management simulators, this could be either a good or a bad thing. If you've played one, you've played em all, but for the uninitiated,…
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JAM: Jets Aliens Missiles Review
There are some genres that are pretty difficult to adjust an iPhone control scheme to, and one of these is the shoot'em-up and its sibling, the side scrolling shooter (maybe we should call these triple S games). The biggest challenges are moving your craft without your finger obscuring vision, and how to tackle the design of shooting enemies from your craft. Now there are many entries in the App Store that have solved these problems adequately enough to create an enjoyable experience,…
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Electric Tentacle Review
Sometimes you feel ridiculous repeating the premises of some iPhone titles, but at least a lot of them seem to make sense, at least in their own strange universe. With Electric Tentacle, even its universe is an oddity. Animals shrunk to microscopic size, using electricity to travel through the highways and bi-ways of where ever you've been stuck, trying to escape the evil nanomachines. Keep in mind that this is a high score game based around seeing how far you can get before you head t…
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Super Monsters Ate My Condo! Review
Though it's mostly gone out of fashion, one of the defining characteristics on the Super Nintendo was that most sequels (and even some original games) had the word 'super' in front of them. It was meant to invoke the image of just not any sequel, but an upgrade to everything that had come before. More revolution than evolution. In the case of Super Monsters ate my Condo, sadly it's the latter and not the former. Not that it's a bad release, but it falls a little short of the expectatio…
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Recess Riot Review
If you're going to use an art style reminiscent of the 80s in all its eight-bit glory, and the game is based around recess, you best do your research about the games of the time. I mean yes, I’m showing my age here, and there was jump rope and dodge ball, but we also played four square and wall ball! Well there is a 'coming soon' icon in the game, so hopefully this can be addressed in a future update. All kidding aside, Recess Riot is a collection of two arcade based mini-games…
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Bad Piggies Review
You'd be forgiven for thinking Rovio spent too long resting on their laurels after Angry Birds, opting to drive the franchise instead of seeking new horizons. Thankfully Amazing Alex found its way out of the studio (albeit as a re-branding of an existing game) and it was clear the studio was ready to try something new. Note, not 'different' - one can't claim that Bad Piggies breaks away from the physics-puzzle-and-three-star formula we've come to know so well, but it's most definitely…
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Amazing Runner Review
It seems every man and his dog is throwing their hat in to the 'Temple Run' arena of game-a-likes, and Freyr Games are no exception with their Unreal Engine powered title Amazing Runner. Once you hit start you'll be placed on a futuristic track lined with golden gems that must be collected while avoiding obvious hazards such as the occasional 'robot' placed in your path or game-ending pits that open up before you. As with its inspirational title, tilting will move you back and forth…
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God of Blades Review
Fans of classic sci-fi fantasy or 70s synth/prog-rock may need to brace themselves for the likes of White Whale Games' God of Blades. With writing that invokes shades of HP Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, and artwork that feels like a nightmare trip through Frank Frazetta's mind, there's not an inch of this game that isn't dripping with a strangely appealing other-worldly sheen. These connections are strengthened even further thanks to each of the game's four chapters having its own '…
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DEMONS' SCORE Review
When you bring together notable composers responsible for the stunning soundtracks of games like Final Fantasy 11, Nier, and Secret of Mana, you’d like to think their work is showcased appropriately. I’m not entirely sold on the ‘appropriate’ part when it comes to the magic-transforming-teenager-and-skimpy-clothes department of Demons’ Soul by Square Enix, but the rhythm-based gameplay is perhaps the best way to showcase its music. You play as Ser…
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