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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…
Alto’s OdysseyMotorsport Manager 3 gives you more control over its Formula 1 racing simulation than ever before [Review]
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]
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]
Blast through the monsters of the deep in aquatic shmup Earth Atlantis [Review]
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…
A hands-on with new puzzler The Eyes of Ara [Video]
Five tips for strategy puzzler Look, Your Loot! [Video]
Tests your ability to tap and keep track in vibrant arcade puzzler Color Tracks Go
Those craving a little visual stimulation and excitement from their mobile puzzle games will want to check out Color Tracks Go. Having already taken Android by storm, today marks the first time it’s free to download for IOS players, letting them test their tapping reflex skills and get their colour-filled fix to topple the online leaderboard against friends. Whether you jump into the game’s Curves, Reflection, or Choice mode, you’ll need to stay focussed to stay in line with the coloured paths you’re required to trace and tap, and extra vigilant when the track count changes as you play. Sometimes you might be needed to use more than one finger to finish a lev…
Solve tricky logic puzzles in The Sequence 2, releasing on iOS next month
The Sequence 2 is an abstract logic-based puzzler in the vein of games like SpaceChem and Perfect Paths, challenging you to construct elaborite Rube Goldberg-esque mechanisms that work in harmony to transport inputs to a waiting output. Your goal is simple: manuever a red circles across the hexagonal grid to an exit tile. But that's not so easy when you need to do so by synchronizing numerous nodes to work together to move those circles through the tight map, not just once but in repeatable cycles that don't stall mid-loop. The nodes you place have various functions, from pushing or pulling circles to rotating their position. Combining those functions allow you to methodically…
