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Asphalt 9: Legends soft-launches its gorgeous arcade racing on the Philippines app store
The Asphalt series has been bringing impressive arcade racing to mobile for over a decade and its latest, and ninth, game Legends looks like it might be the fastest and prettiest entry yet. While the worldwide release is still in the works, the game is currently available through a soft launch in the Philippines. Featuring over fifty cars to unlock, Legends once again unleashed you on twisting tracks in hectic Burnout-inspired races, complete with huge jumps and crashing rival racers. Tracks take you from the tornado-threatened roads of the Midwest to the narrow mountain passes of the Himalayas, with each successful finish letting you upgrade and customize your favorite vehicle…
Asphalt 9Plan planet-wide conflicts in sci-fi real-time strategy game Element
Real time strategy games often revolve flat battlefields, managing bases and your army along frontlines. Element takes that idea and gives it a global twist, challenging you to wage war on land, sea, and space. Across low-poly planets, Element places you in the role of a commander in a futuristic conflict. The solar system is dying and each planet is another foothold to gather resources in your race for interstellar expansion. As you expand your network of mines and capture useful territory on planet surfaces, your options grow, letting you unleash supply drones and low-orbit artillery strikes that streak around the planet towards targets. Improve your tech enough and you can even harvest…
A Steel Media round-up for the week of February 19th
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 provides his impressions of Alto’s Odyssey, praising its mesmerizing sense of place and aesthetic, the addicting flow of its mechanics, and the engaging evolution of the first game’s design. For Pocket Gamer, Jon Mundy provides a list of worthy titles for the player looking for Metal Gear Solid-style gameplay on the go, if the recent Metal Gear Survive isn’t sating that niche. The long range assassinations of Hitman: Sniper, the camera-hacking sleuthing of Republique, and several others make…
Test your trap-dodging reflexes in hectic arcade runner Glitch Dash, out for iOS and Android
High scores and dangerous gauntlets await in Glitch Dash, the latest entry to The well-trodden genre of extra-challenging arcade games. From Temple Run to the frenetic Super Hexagon, it’s a genre quite at home on mobile and Glitch Dash brings a striking aesthetic and twisting stages to the table. Each stage in Glitch Dash forms before your sprinting perspective, revealing lanes of barriers, spikes, lasers, and other traps to evade. Quick reactions will see you deftly side-stepping, leaping over, or sliding under walls, while massive hammers rhythmically smash down upon your path and swinging blades force you to time your lane switching. To add to the hectic nature of your run, speci…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Dark Echo
Many horror games rely on jump scares and creepy atmosphere, but the stealth/horror/puzzle hybrid Dark Echo takes a different approach, instead conjuring horror from the unknown and unseen, through minimalist visuals and immersive audio. While other mobile games like Papa Sangre and The Nightjar have delivered gameplay through sound, Dark Echo melds visuals with sound; every level starts out with a black screen, your white footprints the only color amid the surrounding dark. Move forward and lines emanate in all directions, the sound of your footsteps visualized, bouncing off the walls and revealing the environment. Without sound, you are blind. Your goal is simply to find the exit. Howev…
Dissembler offers a colorful twist on the matching puzzler, available on iOS
Ian MacLarty’s past games like Boson X and Black Hole Joyrider have all taken uniquely different angles on the runner genre, whether it’s the former‘s rotating gauntlets or Joyrider’s limited-fuel races. His newest iOS title, Dissembler, shifts from hectic arcade action to colorful minimalist puzzles, but maintains the trend of taking a different approach with its genre. At its core, Dissembler is a matching puzzler, challenging you to shift tiles and match colors. But rather than new tiles appearing or the goal of a high score, Dissembler presens you with over a hundred single-screen collages and asks you to break down the design tile-by-tile, until none remain. T…
Cute platformer Reed makes the jump from Android to iOS on March 8th
After releasing last year on Android, Reed is bringing its cat-like character and challenging platforming to the App Store next month. As an agile creation of a powerful supercomputer, your running, jumping, and trap dodging in Reed is your attempt to save your creator and the world by collecting its scattered cubes. Giving you only a double jump, Reed pits you against fifty gauntlets of spikes, saws, enemies, and other hazards, as well as secret levels to discover and tricky achievements to collect. Published by Crescent Moon Games, Reed will be $1.99 when it releases on iPad and iPhone and currently can be preordered on the App Store. In the meantime, you can also find the game on Goog…
Returner 77 concludes its sci-fi puzzle adventure with the release of the Den chapter
More than a few games have followed in the footsteps of The Room, exploring tactile hands-on puzzle solving through different themes. Games like House of Da Vinci have gone for a familiar Victorian style, but Returner 77 designed its rooms and puzzles with science fiction flair. Now the game’s final chapter, titled The Den, is available on iOS, added in a recent update. Returner 77 tasks you with exploring an attacking alien force’s crystal ship, in the hopes of finding a way to save Earth. Within its odd corridors and otherworldly rooms rest machinery and extraterrestrial contrapations to interact with, letting you progress deeper into the vessel and through the game’s…
Death Squared doubles the tricky challenges in this color-based iOS puzzler
The block-pushing Sokoban-style puzzler has seen myriad variations and permutations on mobile, but while others may be more complex or minimalist, few can claim to as clever and mischevously designed as the newly-ported-to-iOS Death Squared. At its core, you think you might know how Death Squared works: manuever blocks around tight levels filled with gaps and barriers and corners, pushing those blocks into the right spots. And you would be right; Death Squared does want you to solve its 80 main levels like that, enhanced with color-based twist where red and blue objects and traps interact with the like-colored blocks. Death Squared works like that, until you realize moving a block makes…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Five Card Quest
Developer Rocketcat is best known for their popular RPG and action roguelike releases Mage Gauntlet, Wayward Souls, and Death Road To Canada, but amid their larger titles lies a smaller and intriguing outlier of a game, the turn-based minimalist roguelike Five Card Quest. Selecting a trio of warriors from powerful Priest, the dagger-wielding Rogue, and more, you battle room-by-room through grid-based dungeons. The focus here are those battles, an interesting blend of card game and lane-based strategy; tour party is one side of the screen, enemies on the other, spread out across three lanes. From each warrior’s deck, you choose abilities and attacks, all revolving around the ta…
Manipulate gravity to master your high-scoring flow in Flo, headed to iOS and Android in 2018
If you’re looking for your next high-scoring addiction, you might want to keep an eye on Flo, an upcoming arcade game bringing a minimalist aesthetic and skillful mechanics to iOS and Android. Guiding a swooping orbs along rolling hills, you alter gravity with a tap of the screen to dive through the ground and ride along the underside of your endless path. You’ll need to time these shifts too, as mines block your path and a smoky wall of death is following close behind. Similar to Tiny Wings, sliding down hills will increase your speed; with these carefully-timed accelerations, you can literally smash through your friend’s scores, marked on the screen as walls to shatter…
Alto’s Odyssey brings desert boarding to the App Store next week
The autorunner has been one of the prolific genres on mobile, seeing all manner of 3D and side-scrolling variants. But Alto’s Adventure was perhaps one of the most unique, with its gorgeous wintry visuals and the trick-chaining flow of its gameplay. Now Alto’s Odyssey is headed to iOS on the 22nd, swapping the snowy vistas for dunes, sandstorms, and desert cliffs. At its core, Alto’s Odyssey promises the same smooth and familiar boarding action of its predecesso, challenging you to time backflips for speed boosts and grinding on cables and rails to collect elusive coins. However, this time, you’re boarding through the dunes, canyons, and temples of a my…
Dungeon defense receives an action movie twist in Forgive Me My Henchmen, coming to iOS and Android
Forgive Me My Henchmen takes the classic action plot - wronged hero on an one-man army rampage through countless foes - and lets you play the other side of that story, a satrica lane defense strategy game that pits you in control of the henchmen and their base’s defenses. Similar to the classic Dungeon Keeper titles, Forgive Me My Henchmen presents your base in 2D pixel art and provides an array of bad guys and obstacles to place in the path of the rampaging hero. Simple grunts as fodder, doors to slow his approach, explosives to deliver damage, posters to boost morale, even special units like Janitors...all strategically positioned to work in tandem and overcome the hero. A…
True Legacy tells a cyberpunk mystery through interactive fiction and puzzles
Since Blade Runner, cyberpunk and detective thriller have been entwined in numerous sci-fi works, even among mobile games with titles such as Gemini Rue. True Legacy adds a text adventure flair to the cyberpunk mystery, out now on iOS. As investigator Thornhill, you begin True Legacy looking into a mysterious death, an incident that leads across the game’s dystopian city and through its future of AI, machines, and genetics. Scrolling prose, complete with highlighted notes that provide more context about the world, drive the story forward as you make choices; reminiscent of Device 6, text might offshoot to the sides and other directions, revealing new information and other scene…
Hidden Gem of the Week: Euclidea
Math-based puzzlers tend to revolve around computation and sums, but Euclidea isn't like most games in that niche; rather than numbers, geometry is the focus, constructing figures and shapes with minimalist tools and within a minimalist aesthetic. Euclidea starts out simple, easing you into its collection of geometric brainteasers by teaching how to create line segments, select points, draw circles. And then gradually, the challenge begins to increase, as you use intersecting circles to create equilateral triangles and perfectly bisect lines. But the game isn't completely merciless. As you master the simpler tasks like deducing parallet lines, Euclidea provides tools that automatica…
