Gemini duel: Two-player tower defense Stratosphere adds new content

By On , 4:05 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Come and knock on my door.

Tower defense loves company.

Here’s an idea that could breathe some life into the somnolent tower defense genre: head-to-head duels on a single iPad. I’ve seen this formulation a couple of times but never as confidently executed as it is by Stratosphere. Tower defense is generally such a dull exercise in optimization that being able to trash-talk an opponent face-to-face can only improve the experience.

Stratosphere launched on iOS a few months ago but developers Pixile Studios have just refreshed the game with new levels and new AIs. We haven’t reviewed a tower defense game since Fieldrunners 2 came out last year but I might just give this one a go.

There’s a new trailer for Stratosphere with details of the new added content after the jump.

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Battle of the Bulge Lite submitted to the App Store

By On , 5:29 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Just Joachim.

Pied Peiper.

If you’ve somehow managed to resist the wily charms of Battle of the Bulge since it was released just before Christmas, then you are to be congratulated for your Stoic restraint. Clearly you’re some sort of non-gaming monk who’s only here for the cocktail recipes? Even you will soon have no reason to avoid 2012′s Wargame of the Year.

Hot on the heels of their release of new scenarios and AIs for Battle of the Bulge, Shenandoah Studio have unexpectedly revealed the impending arrival of Battle of the Bulge Lite, a free version of the wargame that lets you play the shorter “Race to the Meuse” scenario. In a rather open-handed gesture, any owner of the full version of the game may invite a Lite version player to play a game of any of Bulge’s scenarios.

App Store review times are currently averaging around five days, so it’s reasonable to expect that Bulge Lite will be available this time next week. I’ll keep you posted.

Review: Las Vegas

By On , 3:07 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS Reviews
Looks just like Vegas. Minus the ladies of the night.

Looks just like Vegas. Minus the ladies of the night.

Las Vegas. A neon-lit oasis of human debauchery in the desert of Nevada. A place where the affluent pray at their shining temples to Mammon and the unwashed huddle in hopeful despair for the chance to, someday, worship alongside them. Here the seven sins aren’t taboos to be avoided, but instead an industry concerned with emptying your wallets and dragging your soul to the depths of hell.

Here is a town…wait…what’s that?

Oh, I’m writing about Las Vegas the iOS app? Oh. Well, forget all that crap, because this app and the real Las Vegas have absolutely nothing in common. Except the dice, I guess. Both Las Vegas the city and Las Vegas the digital board game have dice, but that’s where the similarities end.

So, does this luck-filled dice-fest have any business joining the ranks of the much ballyhooed board game ports that we’re seeing on our tablets lately?

I’m happy to report that it does.

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Allied Corps is looking iPad-ready in new screenshots

By On , 8:23 am GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Sorry, Werner.

Dr von Braun won’t be pleased about this.

It seems the apex of cruelty for Slitherine to start teasing us with Allied Corps, the forthcoming PC follow-up to operational wargame Panzer Corps. The iPad version of the original game seems to be on a cosmic treadmill: it’s been six months away for about a year and a half now.

Slitherine have put together a pretty slick trailer for Allied Corps that I reckon will also be the intro cinematic — there’s also been screenshots of the game leaking out steadily through the developer’s Facebook page. For us, the important thing about these screenshots is their demonstration that Allied Corps is new assets running on the Panzer Corps engine, which suggests getting the new game onto the iPad will be straightforward once the older title has been coerced onto the platform. Slitherine is so gung-ho for tablets that I can’t imagine they won’t.

Allied Corps is due out for PC on the 6th of June — my spidey senses tell me that the iPad version will announced shortly thereafter.

Totaled: Playdek may have cancelled Smash Up

By On , 6:12 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
0461

Smash the state.

With Playdek’s 2013 dance card filling up with Dungeons & Dragons, a new expansion for Ascension, and the imminent release of Agricola, perhaps it’s not surprising that one project is sliding off the timetable. A sharp-eyed Pocket Tactics reader noted yesterday that Smash Up — the popular card game that Playdek had announced last August — has vanished from the publisher’s website. While that doesn’t mean much by itself, Playdek reps declined to comment on the matter in an email exchange today, suggesting that the iOS port has gone the way of the dodo and memorizing people’s phone numbers.

The contractual binds that tie publishers, rightsholders, and developers can get very tangled indeed, so we can’t say if the impetus behind this move lies with Playdek or with rightsholder Alderac, who did not respond to a request for comment.

For more details about Playdek’s plans for this year, have a read of my interview with Playdek’s George Rothrock and Gary Weis from last month.

Hat-tip to Zach Huff.

Out Tonight: Frozen Synapse and ERA Deluxe

By On , 4:33 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Out tonight
I want a nice, clean dispersal this time.

Check those corners.

Many releases seem to be steering well clear of the traditional Wednesday night App Store launch this week, which is entirely sensible given that tonight’s arrival of Frozen Synapse for iPad will create a giant fun vortex that will suck all of the attention away from everything else and leave lesser apps with their eyes bugging out of their heads like the end of Total Recall.

Frozen Synapse is pretty bloody good, is what I’m saying. There’s a couple of other things worth a look later tonight — we’ll run them down after the jump.

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Review: The Howler

By On , 12:00 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS Reviews
Never has distributing newspapers to quell a rioting populace been so... that exact thing.

Never has distributing newspapers to quell a rioting populace been so… that exact thing.

There’s a scene in HBO’s John Adams where the titular protagonist (America’s orneriest, grumbliest, most Paul Giamatti-est diplomat-turned-president) is in Paris, watching the Montgolfier brothers take one of their globes aérostatique to the sky with his wife, Abagail, and his constitutional bestie, Thomas Jefferson. As the craft ascends, Jefferson remarks that, now, “mankind floats upon a limitless plane of air.” Adams, mugging the rustic, colonial equivalent of the troll face, quips, “Hmmm. Hot air.”

I feel similarly conflicted about The Howler, a side-scrolling game of steampunk aeronautics and loud panting. Because what President Giamatti was hitting on back in 1700s France wasn’t just the growing divide between the desire for individualism set against the need for a strong central government, but the simple fact that sometimes our reach exceeds our grasp. Or rather, our grasp exceeds our ability to ask, “Why am I grasping at all?”

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How civilized: FreeCiv now playable in mobile browsers

By On , 9:57 am GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
Elan!

Watch out, Portuguys.

Now that Firaxis is getting serious about iOS as a platform, maybe expecting a proper Civilization game for mobile isn’t just wishful thinking anymore. It’s not that 2K China’s slightly rough-around-the-edges Civilization Revolution is bad, exactly, but for the hardcore Civ junkie it’s like a slightly underweight dose of methadone.

For the patient and continually net-connected there is a new fix: the browser-based version of open-source Civ II clone FreeCiv is back on the web, and it’ll work (mostly) on your mobile browser.

Unlike Open Panzer, which was developed with Android and iOS in mind, FreeCiv’s mobile browser-friendliness seems to be more of a happy Javascript accident. It would be a stretch to call the game’s interface “responsive” on iPad Safari, but it works — and given FreeCiv’s near-continuous development over the last two decades, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to hope that it’ll get better. And you can always just download FreeCiv for your old-timey Mac or PC anyway.

Hat-tip to Mr F. Wolf.

Frost bite: Triple Town makers reveal moody puzzler Road Not Taken

By On , 6:34 pm GMT · Add Comment · In Android News, iOS News
Two paths diverged in a yellow wood.

North of Boston.

When we last talked about Spry Fox it was when we were speculating that browser-based collectible miniatures game Highgrounds could be their next iOS/Android offering. A new blog post from the developers of puzzle phenomenon Triple Town reveals that, alas, Highgrounds for mobile isn’t their next project — but what they’ve got on tap looks just as compelling.

I don’t typically approve of cutting and pasting from marketing materials — but get a load of this:

Road Not Taken is an original puzzle game about life and loss[.] Adventure through a vast, ever-changing forest in the aftermath of a brutal winter storm.

The devs also cite Robert Frost’s eponymous poem (and English 101 staple) as inspiration for The Road Not Taken.

From another dev perhaps, the announcement that their next game is about “loss” would possibly come off as pretentious, but there’s a certain melancholy hanging about in the visuals of Triple Town that this new game seems to be putting front and center. I think this will be worth watching.

Spry Fox will be revealing more about Road Not Taken over the coming months. Have a watch of a lovely watercoloured teaser video after the jump.

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Generation gap: Spearhead Platoon crowdfunds WWIII

By On , 3:40 pm GMT · Add Comment · In iOS News
Spearhead!

The Third Herd.

Imagine a 1987 where the Cold War went hot — a cataclysm that would have destabilized the entire world’s security, threatened millions of people with the prospect of war on their doorsteps, and prevented the release of Beverly Hills Cop II.

Currently Kickstarting iPad wargame Spearhead Platoon presupposes just that: a Soviet armored division rolls into the Fulda Gap, and only a decisive response from the US Army corps in West Germany can avert an escalation into all-out nuclear war.

The game puts you in command of a platoon of four M1 tanks from the US 3rd Armored Division (the unit to which luminaries such as Creighton Abrams and Elvis belonged) and lets you control them RTS-style via a tactical map view or in a real-time 3rd-person view for those after a more action-oriented tank sim experience.

Spearhead Platoon is the work of newly-formed studio Stormcharge. The gameplay video they’re showing off demonstrates their 3D animation chops — some of the crew worked on moon Nazi comedy (?) Iron Sky and PC gamers of a certain age may recall hunting for Quake CTF servers with The All-Seeing Eye, another product that you’ll find Stormcharge names in the credits for.

We haven’t seen too many alternate history scenarios for NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict in the past few years on PC and there’s certainly none on iOS. As a kid who read far too many mediocre Tom Clancy novels, I love this idea, and I think I’ll be opening up my wallet for the Kickstarter.

Have a look at the Spearhead Platoon video after the jump and see if you don’t want to chip in for their Kickstarter. They aim to release the game for iPad this autumn.
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