Headphones Review Round Up [Hardware]: SIVGA SV021, VR500, UX3000, and VR2000
By Simon Reed
Update: SIVGA SV021 tested and rated!Boulies Elite Max Chair [Hardware] Review – Assemble, Adjust, Relax
By Adele Wilson
What do we think of the Boulies Elite Max Chair?Red Magic 9S Pro [Hardware] Review – The New Standard For Mobile Gaming?
By Sho Roberts
My Red Magic 9S Pro Review puts this incredible bit of tech through its paces to determine whether it's worth your money.
Category: Reviews
League of War Review
By Rob Rich
I've never really been into "castle defense" games, regardless of whether or not they involve actual castles. I don't have anything against them; they just don't do it for me. I do, however, enjoy card collecting. That's probably why I've been enjoying League of War so much. Well, that and the rather impressive production values. Those don't hurt, either.League of War may not involve castles, but it does involve defending your base by churning out lots and lots of soldiers and vehicles. Soldiers and vehicles that, incidentally, will try to rush across the field and blow up your opponent's base. Your Supply Lines pull in resources that you can use to summon units for fighting, and can be boosted several times over the course of a match to make them even more productive. The trade-off being that the resources you spend boosting your supply lines could've been used to crop a tank or something.Make It Rain: The Love of Money Review
By Nadia Oxford
Make it Rain: The Love of Money is a reflex / tapping game in the vein of Cookie Clicker, but instead of tapping cookies to make them multiply (in their mysterious, doughy way), you "slide" bills off an endless stack to "make it rain," as you're instructed to do by the game's very name.By now, there should be enough Cookie Clicker-type games on the App Store and Google Play for you to begin making a decision about whether you love them or loathe them. Make it Rain: The Love of Money isn't much deeper than previously-released tapping games, but it has one major advantage over the competition: Sliding the bills off a stack is far more gratifying than simply tapping on a screen fast enough for your finger to ignite.dEXTRIS Review
By Nadia Oxford
Whether you love or hate Flappy Bird and the cyclopean bugger that flits through its devilish levels, there's no arguing Dong Nguyen's unassuming game has caused a resurgence of arcade-style titles on the App Store and Google Play. Even though all these games generally require players to utilize one (sometimes two) fingers and follow simple rule sets, some still manage to be more sophisticated than others.dEXTRIS by Chaotic Box falls a little closer to the "sophisticated" side of the recent arcade game resurrection. Like Flappy Bird, dEXTRIS' basics are very easy to grasp, its controls are uncomplicated, it's challenging, and your only job in the game is to get a high score. Unlike Flappy Bird, however, dEXTRIS is a slick-looking game with an adrenaline-fueling soundtrack.Oh, and like Flappy Bird, dEXTRIS is addictive. Frustratingly, head-smashingly, "Why am I playing this oh just one more level" addictive.Toy Rush Review
By Nick Tylwalk
If the Toy Story movies taught us anything, it's that toys have minds of their own. It might be more than one step from free will to organized tower attack and defense drills, but Toy Rush skips everything in-between and gives us toys battling toys with a collectible card game element thrown in for good measure. It's as zany as it sounds, yet it'll have you sending toys to their doom by the dozens without even batting an eye.Toy Rush manages to nail the balance that many games seek but can't find: it makes its core mechanics simple to learn but challenging to master. Each toy in your collection is represented by a card, and when you are on the attack, you simply drag cards onto the starting point of the level in question and watch your playthings go to work.Shadow Fight 2 Review
By Rob Rich
Having no prior experience with the first game, I went in to Shadow Fight 2 totally blind. Which, I suppose, kind of makes sense. You know… because everyone's a shadow. But while I was extremely impressed with the fluidity of the animations and the detail on the character silhouettes, that all quickly gave way to frustration as I found myself fighting the controls more than my opponents.When the nameless protagonist is somehow reduced to nothing more than a mere (and literal) shadow of his former self, he'll have to fight to get it back. And I mean really fight for it. All sorts of demons and henchmen stand is his way, and none of them want to make it easy. Fortunately he's a reasonably proficient fighter - at least, he's getting there. That's where you come in.Shadow Fight 2 plays much like a traditional fighting game, only combat is a bit slower and there's steady character progression. As you beat down other shadows, or even get beat down yourself, you'll earn money that can be spent on better equipment. Better equipment will give you better odds against tougher opponents, which will in-turn allow you to earn even more money for even better gear.Kiwanuka Review
By Andy Chalk
Kiwanuka is cute, charming, simple and even a little bit biblical: With nothing but a magical staff and steely determination, you must embark upon a daunting quest to lead your followers to freedom.The people of Kiwanuka need your help! They've somehow managed to trap themselves on floating space rocks, and it's up to the bearer of the magical lightning staff to lead them to the sacred triangle of freedom! That's more or less how it goes, anyway. The bottom line is that you have the staff and that means you call the shots.Your magical staff shoots lightning, but it's not the sort of lightning you use to smite your enemies. Instead, by touching the staff and dragging left or right, you draw an arc of electricity that your avatar and his flock will follow. Things get really interesting when you drag the arc straight up, because that causes your followers to stand on one another's shoulders, forming a column of varying height that you can then tip over and use as a bridge.Republique Episode 2: Metamorphosis Review
By Nick Tylwalk
Hope is still alive -- and if you didn't want any spoilers, you should go play the first episode of République before reading the rest of this review. The second installment is titled Metamorphosis, a word that has multiple meanings within Camouflaj's story-driven stealth and puzzle-solving epic. Happily, it doesn't mean the game is changing into something lesser, just building on a great first chapter by adding on a few new layers to both story and gameplay.Metamorphosis picks up right where Exordium left off, and in some ways, right where it started as well. Hope is trapped somewhere she'd rather not be, and to keep her safe, it's going to take a mastery of hacking into the network of surveillance cameras and computer systems in her environment. A default profile can be used to skip right to this chapter if so desired, but playing through its predecessor helps in understanding the core mechanics and is virtually mandatory for making sense of the plot.Record Run Review
Record Run has the makings of a mobile best-seller: a short-burst, pick-up-and-play runner that lets players dodge obstacles to the beat of their own tunes. With a triple-A pedigree from publisher Harmonix, known for catchy music game must-haves like Rock Band and Dance Central, the sky was the limit for this bite-sized behemoth. Unfortunately, forgettable gameplay and a limiting IAP structure weigh down the experience and prevent it from soaring.The main gimmick behind Record Run is a popular staple of the rhythm genre: you can load any song into the game and it will generate a level synched to that tune. Like Audiosurf and Beat Hazard before it, Record Run has chosen this method of content generation as its banner, and has barely supplemented its user-provided music library with four built-in songs. The problem is that Record Run also limits its user-injected library by forcing players to purchase "song slots" for every new song they wish to play, and offers no option to delete previously uploaded songs so a slot can be reused. You'd better be sure you want a song in your library before you upload it, because it's not going anywhere.