As a huge fan of Rocksteady's Batman Arkham series on home game consoles, I've been one of the many fans eagerly anticipating the release of the gritty prequel, Batman: Arkham Origins, coming up at the end of the month. But in a much-welcomed and surprise move, NetherRealm Studios has graced us with a mobile tie-in version of Batman: Arkham Origins. Coming from the same developer who gave a similar mobile treatment to other big-time superhero games like Batman: Arkham City and Injustice: Gods Among Us, how would this latest touchscreen brawler hold up to the expectations of excellence that Batman has brought to the gaming world at large in recent years?Spoiler alert: it holds up well, very well. The fully voiced and animated opening cinematic of Batman: Arkham Origins is simply astounding, and it made me feel like I was watching a full-fledged console game right there in the palm of my hands. The graphics elsewhere in the game are also up to the highest of caliber, from the fluid combat animations to the nice variety of thug types and environments, and the dark and ominous tone of the Batman Arkham console games has been revitalized here quite gloriously. Much like its upcoming big brother console game, the story of Batman: Arkham Origins involves a number of deadly assassins all vying to be the one who kills Batman once and for all, in order to win a substantial monetary reward. This allows the game to incorporate some wonderful and frightening boss fights against these assassins, like Deadshot, Copperhead, and my personal favorite, Deathstroke.The actual gameplay of Batman: Arkham Origins is extremely top-notch, and should be familiar to anyone who's ever played Batman: Arkham City Lockdown or Injustice: Gods Among Us. In each combat mission, players simply tap on the screen to pummel oncoming hordes of street thugs and other devious villains, while holding down two fingers on the screen to defend against blowbacks and other cheap shots. What's great about this is that the control scheme is so easy to get into, but offers just as much depth for those players who really want to make the most of it. Batman is capable of holding two different battle stances, an Assault Stance and a Guarded Stance, and activating each one opens up a number of additional special attacks or healing boosts that you can activate mid-fight.
The wall-eyed, buck-toothed Rabbids have had us doing silly things for years, and now these loony lapins have us hurling them through space. In Rabbids Big Bang, we take part in the Rabbids' very own space program (which consists mainly of trying to collect floating coins and bouncing off planets) and learn to use their proprietary methods for intergalactic travel. Although fun at first, in mastering the game's surprisingly challenging physics-based proceedings, too many similar missions make for quickly-developing monotony.As we all know, the Rabbids are doers, not thinkers. In Rabbids Big Bang, what they're doing is seeing how much adrenaline they can get out of flying around the Universe, powered by nothing more than a strapped-on soda bottle. There's no story to Big Bang, so don't look for one. You simply begin with two Rabbids standing on the surface of a planet, one wearing a jetpack and one holding a baseball bat. Around the planet float other planets, fuel bubbles, gold coins, UFOs, cows, and other weird and inappropriate things, and your goal is to land on, collect, or run into each of these.At the start of every mission, you tap and hold on a round aiming reticule that determines your jet-pack Rabbid's trajectory. Once you let this go, the Rabbid with the bat slugs the Rabbid with the jet-pack, sending him shooting into space. Tap-holding again activates the jet-pack, as long as there's fuel to be had in the on-screen fuel gauge, and allows the jet-pack Rabbid to keep traveling in whatever direction his head's pointing. It sounds simple, but it's extremely unwieldy at first. In fact, many players are likely to spend the first half hour watching in horror (or laughing diabolically) as their jet-pack Rabbid repeatedly slams head-first into its home planet.
The Hugh Jackman flick Real Steel made $85 million domestically with its "What if Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots was a real thing?" concept. That may or may not be enough money to warrant a sequel, but Reliance Games feels there's more life in the franchise to make Real Steel: World Robot Boxing for iOS and Android. It's free-to-play, simple to learn, and full of cool visuals, but some unfortunate design decisions keep it from being a knockout.Set after the events of the movie (and knowledge of the film is absolutely not necessary), World Robot Boxing features Atom, Noisy Boy, Midas, and some of the franchise's other stars, but also expands both the scope and the cast of characters. Your ultimate goal is to dethrone Zeus, the WRB champion, by fighting your way through multiple increasingly difficult circuits of robot fighters. Three bots are yours to choose from to start, with a fourth available if you can convince a friend to play too."Let's get the obvious part out of the way: boxing robots is just a flat out awesome idea, and one that appeals to the five-year-old boy or girl in all of us. This game doesn't disappoint in its efforts to bring those clashes to life, sporting better graphics than the first Real Steel mobile game and some creative robot designs. The themes are great - there's a football-inspired fighter, one with a blackjack motif, a cowboy bot with arms shaped like six-shooters, and more.Pitting them against each other is fairly straightforward, with a virtual d-pad on the left and buttons on the right. Boxing is a strictly 2D affair here, which limits you to punching and blocking, but there's still some strategy required as you look to counter when your opponent's guard is down. The game doesn't explain this fully, but pressing the pad while hitting the light or heavy attack buttons throws a slightly different kind of punch for each direction, so there are more options than it may initially appear.
Big Business Deluxe is a follow-up to Game Insight's 2010 simulation title Big Business, a Facebook game that leaped to the mobile world with no shortage of applause. The sequel keeps the basic framework the same as the original, only now there's more of pretty much everything! And if you played Big Business, you know that's a very big deal.Big Business Deluxe can broadly be described as a city building game combined with Farm Frenzy and doled out in short, free-to-play doses. The game places heavy emphasis on creating structures that produce basic items that are then transformed into more complex (and more valuable) things. For example, growing grain on a farm, and then turning it into flour. Instead of simply tapping icons to make things and turn a profit, you have to concern yourself with all the little details of the city/business, such as where the warehouses are and what kind of trucks are running. It sounds like a mess, but it's strangely captivating once you get the hang of it."As you slowly gain money, unlock new buildings, and improve old ones, you get the wonderful honor of being able to expand your city's footprint by purchasing adjacent parcels of land. Not only does this give you additional space, but it can also uncover nice rewards in the form of new buildings, new quests, or other small rewards. It's a nice incentive to reach out and seize property as soon as you can!
For the most part, bears are pretty nice. Oh sure, a mother bear will fully rip your face off should you get in between her and her cubs, but usually the world's largest land predator would rather just hang around waterfalls catching salmon and looking cute and stuff like that. But imagine waking up to a world in which bears were the dominant species. Walking upright, they dress as humans do, populate zoos with mankind, and learn to speak. That would be totally weird, right? And yet this is what happens in the aptly titled Fist of Awesome from developer Nicoll Hunt's imprint, I Fight Bears - an indie publisher which proclaims from the title screen that they make "games for people with beards."Our hero, a lumberjack type named Tim Burr, is enjoying a reunion of friends and family when his fist suddenly explodes in size (think Foo Fighter's excellent Everlong music video) and begins to speak to him. The fist goes by the name of Awesome, and he is here with terrible, bone-chilling news! At some point in history, the space/time continuum was disrupted resulting in an alternate present in which bears call the shots. Tim appears to be the one human left who can recall what once was, and he, along with his newly gigantic, wise-cracking fist must undertake a heroic quest to discover what went wrong and right this new and terrible bear-heavy world."First of all, developer Nicoll Hunt needs to be congratulated immediately. According to the credits, most of the development duties were handled by Hunt (with three animators providing support), and the level of detail conveyed with the charmingly retro pixilated graphics is nothing short of astounding. Here is a developer who clearly loves the early days of gaming and has created a universe accordingly. Fist of Awesome reinforces this nostalgic feeling with a healthy does of humor as well. "What the Hall & Oates is going on!?" Tim exclaims early on, and the laughs build from there. Awesome is a great sidekick and provides plenty of jokes and sarcastic banter throughout your adventure in addition to his set of powerful moves.
Back in January, I reviewed a game called Lies of Astaroth. I liked it quite a bit despite there being a few issues with progression, energy management, and a bothersome menu system. Why am I bringing that up? Because Elemental Kingdoms is the exact same game. No, really, it's the exact same game as Lies of Astaroth. The only difference is a visual overhaul and some new audio.That's not to say that there's anything inherently shady going on here, though. After doing a little digging, I was able to find out that Perfect World and iFree Studio have actually been working together on Elemental Kingdoms; so while the original developer's name isn't on "the box," they were still very much a part of the game's creation. At the very least, it's not something to worry about from a legal standpoint."Elemental Kingdoms is every bit the mobile CCG as its almost-twin. Players gather cards, create decks, enhance their favorites by sacrificing lowbies and a little cash, and then square off against NPCs and other players. There's something of a story here as well, which requires steadily fighting through several different areas of increasing difficulty in order to advance. Each section of the world is loosely themed as well (swamp, tundra, etc.), and the cards used by enemies tend to match their elements, which is something worth considering before blindly jumping into a boss fight.
Mimpi is a gorgeous and whimsical platform-adventure with touchscreen controls about a little white dog who discovers one morning that his master has gone missing. So like any good dog, he decides to venture out past his peaceful home and scour the dangerous lands of the earth to find out just where his master went off to.The story and presentation are some of the biggest strengths here in Mimpi, as everything gets told completely without dialogue, and actually gives you a deeper sense of engagement in both the characters and the narrative than most text-heavy games do these days. The graphics are wonderfully bright, with an almost paper-like quality to them at times, and Mimpi's animations are especially fluid and adorable as he hops and platforms along hills, logs, sleepy fish heads, and everything else you can think of in between!But the big twist here is that a lot of objects in the game environment can actually be moved and manipulated by the touch of your finger: something you'll be needing to do a lot of if you want to traverse most of the game's trickier platforming sections and puzzle scenes (not to mention the odd and rather out-of-place hidden object scenes you'll be asked to complete at the end of each larger level).The visuals and world design are the true shining stars here in Mimpi, as everything feels like one enormous and interconnected sidescrolling stage, that takes you through all sorts of different environments from hillsides and forests, to beaches and underwater caves (Mimpi gets to ride around in a giant air bubble during these sections). It's true that you'll never see the same location twice in the game, and the optional bone collectables provide an extra splash of challenge, which unlock cute comic strip stories in the gallery; in addition to the rarer light bulb collectables, which give you an extra hint when you need some help on how to proceed.
Samurai Siege enters a crowded field of mobile combat simulation games whose notable members include Clash of Clans and Greed for Glory. The basic concepts of building your village, strengthening defenses, improving structures, training troops, and sending them out to conquer other villages remains the same. Now, however, instead of dragons or medieval warriors, it's you and a bunch of samurai warriors! Not too shabby, if you ask us.Samurai Siege takes place in two main modes: village management and combat. The former allows you to place and upgrade new structures, such as marketplaces that generate coins or arrow towers to provide rudimentary defense. Here you also unlock troops and train them for battle, storing them in your training fields until it's time to head out and do some conquering. Combat pits you against well-defended enemy villages. Tap the screen to deploy troops, then sit back and watch the action. In the end, it's all about gaining more resources so you can beef up your village to become the ultimate samurai warrior town this side of Kyoto."Currencies are threefold in Samurai Siege. Coins, represented by green circles, are generated from markets, stored in vaults, and are used to build and upgraded defenses. Critically important is upgrading your castle so you can unlock more units and buildings, so never pass up an opportunity to rake in cash. Essence is earned from wells, held in storage tanks, and is used to build and upgrade certain structures. Diamonds are the basic "hurry-up" currency and can be spent to instantly build things, train troops, etc. All of these can be purchased via microtransactions, but you also earn coins and essence by sacking villages. As if you needed another excuse to go out and conquer things.