Aw, lookit the tiny Empire and its widdle Death Star! Lookit the teensy aliens living inside! It's hard to believe something so adorable is still capable of turning teeming planets into asteroid fields with a single, well-focused laser shot. That's evil for you. Turn your back for a second, and bam. That doesn't mean you should stop the Empire's shenanigans. In fact, stifling the activity in Star Wars: Tiny Death Star would be like scolding a child for painting a picture. You don't want to smother blossoming talent, right? Of course you don't.Tiny Death Star is the latest in NimbleBit's Tiny series (which includes Tiny Tower, Pocket Trains, and Pocket Planes), with Disney Mobile taking over the developing duties on this one. As its name suggests, you're in charge of assembling a Death Star level-by-level. Forget innocent airlines and rail-based shipping routes. Now you're building for keeps."But despite the magnitude of building, y'know, an intergalactic weapon of immeasurable destruction (however tiny), Tiny Death Star is more or less Tiny Tower with a Star Wars skin. That's either good news or awful news depending on your outlook. Players desiring a unique new experience coupled with the chance to create some Empire-style mayhem will be disappointed. That said, Tiny Death Star's Star Wars references and themed Bitizens are pretty stinkin' adorable.If you've played Tiny Tower, firing up Tiny Death Star should feel like moving back home. You build up the Death Star level by level, complete with residential areas, restaurants, shops, and services. Yes, to build up funds and complete construction, the Emperor decided the Death Star should essentially become a condominium/shopping mall hybrid.
It's becoming more and more difficult to write about Kairosoft games. The main issue is that they all sort of blur into one after a while - go and read any other Kairosoft review on Gamezebo, and you'll already have a great idea of how Kairosoft's new game Pocket Harvest works. Just replace the theme of the review with farming, and you're away.Kairosoft used to have a great thing going for it, with charming, easy-to-understand management sims that were as expansive as they were exciting. All these years later, and Kairosoft still has the very same thing - except that the excitement has well and truly dropped off. When you've played the exact same game over and over again, simply with a new skin each time, enjoyment levels really start to wane."Pocket Harvest is the worst example yet. You're presented with an isometric grid, on which you can play with fields, paths, and buildings. By planting crops in the fields, filling the houses with workers, and placing down all sorts of tourist attractions, your goal is to build up your cash reserves, buy the surrounding land, and become the most lucrative farm in the world.Everything here is the hallmark of a great Kairosoft game. You've got workers who potter around, planting seeds and digging up tomatoes, carrots, and the like; There's tourists who can't wait to buy a fruit juice and see the sights and smells your farm has to offer; And fun little animations that play along the bottom of the screen to show how a worker is progressing towards all forms of expansion.
Nightbird Trigger X, the new puzzle/shooter hybrid from COLOPL Inc. had potential for greatness locked in its sights. But in the end, a forced social element and a few perplexing monetization calls caused it to miss its target.Trapped behind the concrete walls of a future metropolis, our cannon wielding anti-hero must use expert timing and a touch of luck to shatter the core of each room's security system while hypnotic patterns of living neon light shield it from incoming fire, giving up only fleeting chances for a clear shot; and all the while, under the relentless ticking of a time-bomb set to blow. Now, I'm not totally clear on just why our man in white was breaking and entering in the first place (the intro video was heavy on action but light on info), but thankfully the set-up doesn't matter too much with this one.And at least the gameplay is fairly straightforward. Each room is set up pretty much the same way. On an elevated platform on the left side of the screen stands our player character. In the middle of the screen we have a psychedelic swarm of primary shapes, simple machines, particles, and light that weaves around the playfield to and fro, blocking the player's laser beams from hitting the previously mentioned core that rests on the far right of the screen and acts as a doorway to the next room.
If ever there was a Marvel superhero crying out for an awesome video game, it has to be Thor. I mean, we're not talking about some guy in tights; he's the freaking Norse God of Thunder! A really good Thor game should make you feel like you could put the tablet down and go lift Mjolnir yourself. I'm sad to say that despite a game effort by Gameloft, Thor: The Dark World does not quite prove itself one of the worthy.It's hard to say exactly what kind of game Thor: The Dark World is supposed to be. Sometimes that's good, as coloring outside of the normal genre lines is always welcome. It's not so good when the game is hard to categorize because the parts don't all fit together. In this case, there's a narrative, nicely animated and voice acted. No problems there, as the production values are first rate - and they should be, because this game is taking up a lot of memory for a mobile game. Loki is scheming for the throne of Asgard, as always, but there's also a threat from a group called the Marauders (not the X-Men villains, alas). Thor is on the case, and he's got help.Maybe too much help, honestly. Yes, these are Asgardian threats menacing five of the Nine Worlds and not Earth criminals, but Thor gets a ton of assistance. Some comes in the form of allies like the Warriors Three, Sif, and Heimdall. There's also the Asgardian answer to cannon fodder in the Einherjar, consisting of NPC fighters, Valkyrie, and other Norse warriors you can spawn to fight alongside you.
Nature needed a palatable, easily-digestible meal for its carnivores, so it designed the bunny rabbit. That's not to say rabbits sit around and wait to be eaten. Anyone familiar with Watership Down knows the lapin race has its own blessings, including the ability to murder vegetable gardens with blood-chilling efficiency. Stack Rabbit is an action/match-three puzzle game about a rabbit that cuts down garden after garden (vegans: Viewer discretion is advised). This tasty little turnip from Disney is unique and highly addictive, though like the less healthy Candy Crush Saga, later levels of Stack Rabbitare obviously engineered to gobble up your lives in hopes that you'll buy more. Stack Rabbit's starring bunny is Ben, a fluffy white hopper who's been charged with babysitting his brother's kids. Thing is, Ben's brother evidently did not stop making it with his wife long enough to even breathe, and now there are a lot of hungry little mouths for Ben to feed. Luckily, there's a nearby farm with lots of vegetable plots ripe for raiding. Stack Rabbit's levels are set up on a grid. Most of the grid spaces are occupied by a vegetable, or by a sprout. When Ben hops into a fully-grown vegetable, he flings it upon his head (he's got a square head, and these are square vegetables). When he matches three or more identical vegetables, they go towards the total he needs to collect in order to move on to the next patch.There are conditions to collecting, though. Foremost, each patch is guarded by a dog that's not big on the idea of rabbits frolicking in his master's vegetable patches. Said pooch spends most of his time snoozing, but there's an alarm clock that goes off after a certain amount of moves, so Ben needs to do his thing before that happens. Every time you make a match, the move counter ticks down by one. The kicker is that most levels require you to collect vegetables in a certain order. So if the game calls for eggplants and you collect tomatoes, those tomatoes don't count towards your level progress.
Combat Monsters, the virtual card battle game with echoes of Magic: The Gathering is now in full release, and if you played and enjoyed it during the beta period, you'll be pleased to know that very little has changed over the past couple of months. And if you haven't, you probably should - it's a fun, challenging strategy card game, and while some of the multiplayer features are lacking, it gets the free-to-play formula right, a rare accomplishment these days.Even if you have only a basic idea of what Magic: The Gathering is, there's no mistaking the similarities between that famous card game and Combat Monsters. In fact, Paul Johnson, the co-founder of Rubicon Development is an "avid player" of Magic, but wanted a video game with a more tactical experience. Thus, Combat Monsters, in which you not only collect virtual cards of various types and abilities and deploy them in single and multiplayer duels, but also maneuver on a 3D game board, complete with special hexes that can amplify your powers - or your enemy's."Combat Monsters is very much an "easy to learn, tough to master" game. You begin by choosing a hero - a warrior, an archer, or a mage - who will serve as your personal avatar, and are then given a basic starting deck with which to play. The bulk of your deck will, initially at least, be composed of various fantasy monsters like orcs, minotaurs, elves, zombies and so forth, each of which belongs to one of the three character classes; there are also cards for weapons, armor, equipment, spells, and magical runes. Some "supplemental" cards only work with specific races or classes, and some monster cards have special abilities that manifest under the right conditions: zombies gain health whenever a monster on the board dies, for instance, while orcs gain an attack bonus for every friendly orc in play.
Generally speaking, match-three gamers don't run with role-playing gamers or trading card gamers, but Gamevil, one of South Korea's largest mobile game publishers, plans to alter that. Aiming to make these mismates mingle, Gamevil brings us Spirit Stones, a new three-genre mash-up that bravely blends bits of match-three, bobs of RPG, and driblets of TCG. Although occasionally brought down by repetition and missing sound and interface elements, Spirit Stones basically blows the doors off, thanks to dynamic deck-building and habit-forming combat.In terms of narrative, Spirit Stones falls on the match-three end of the spectrum—meaning, there's not much of one. The context is a fairly predictable good-versus-evil kind of thing, with you being tasked with using the power of the Ancient Gods (the Spirit Stones) to save the kingdom of Dulaz (a place that really should be re-named "The Kingdom of Busty Women," by the look of its subjects). To attain these powerful stones, you must first fight your way through various lands, past all manner of hostile undesirables. Fortunately, you don't have to do it alone: you get to take a party of your bustiest—I mean trustiest, friends with you."All joking aside, it's hard not to notice the 'amplitude' of your warriors since Spirit Stones has enthusiastically embraced an aesthetic that's highly stripperific. Even so, each card displays a great-looking character that's beautifully rendered, and there are an amazing number of them. (Incidentally, characters, 90% of whom are female, are also rendered in battle as weird—and slightly disturbing—baby-faced-but-boobsy bobble-heads.) Credit should definitely be given since a lot of work was put into creating the gorgeous character art, not only for the base cards, but for their enhanced variants.(The game's sound on the other hand, could use some work. Battle result screens seem to be completely lacking music and sound, and the music loop during battle is nothing short of maddening.)
"Die…again!" I shout as I lay waste to a gaggle of undead, hell-bent on eating my brains. I swing my wrench, landing a mighty blow against the crown of an incoming zombie. With the bulk of my ravenous foes lying in a bloody heap on the floor, I make the call to save the rest for later and rebuild a nearby barrier. Switching to my SMG in case more zombies approach from beyond the 2x4s nailed to the wall, I step to the opening and begin the job. It only takes a few moments, but every second counts. I dash past corpses in various states of decomposition, pump a few bullets into an explosive barrel to buy myself precious time, swallow a fistful of painkillers to up my health and reach my goal.I've already refilled the old generator with fuel, and now I must launch the satellite that will allow me to contact the resistance. It works, and my comms connect to the AM frequency. "If you are hearing this, you are the resistance," the disembodied voice tells me. "We have small pockets operating all over the globe. We must live on! We must fight! We need every single one of you." With this new drive to aid the human race, things are finally looking up."But my HUD has just informed me a particularly nasty zombie, the Vomitron, is incoming. I turn as quickly as I can, and it is just in time for the terrible creature to lumber into view and spew puke into my eyes. I fire frantically in his general direction as I wait for the mess to clear, and when my vision returns I can see that he's brought some friends. Damn…out of bullets. With a deep breath of resolve, I brandish my wrench once more and dash heroically into the fray. "You like that!?" I ask as I land the final crippling blow in his melting, undead face.