Zynga was one of the first well-known developers on Facebook, but that pedigree doesn't guarantee the company's future success; in order to stay competitive in the increasingly competitive social game arena, it's got to keep innovating. Of late, the mega-developer - best known for its "Ville" titles - is making new flavors of casual entertainment, and one of the best thus far is jungle-themed bubble popper, Bubble Safari.
Blue Tea Games is known for making strong hidden object adventures, and that's what makes Fabled Legends: The Dark Piper so disappointing. From its ho-hum story concept to its shop-worn gameplay, The Dark Piper marches staidly along, offering little in the way of wonder, mystery, innovation or suspense. With little for veteran gamers to latch onto, The Dark Piper becomes an exercise in mediocrity meant for either the utterly inexperienced or the painfully undiscerning.
If you want to be a retro looking game and play in a 50 pixel by 50 pixel space, then really you need to be pretty simple. There's only so much that can go on in such a tiny spot. In Gunbrick, you play as a tiny square who can rotate left and right with the keyboard and fire a gun that sticks out of one of your four sides. You can't move the gun, you can only change which direction it's pointed by rolling around. It's a unique mechanic and it's put to excellent use over the course of the game.
The comparisons are inevitable so I'm just gonna go ahead and make the obvious one right at the top: Warlock: Master of the Arcane owes its entire existence to Civilization. There. That's out of the way. And while the comparison is inevitable and warranted, that doesn't mean Warlock is some cheap rip-off. On the contrary, it basically takes all the best parts and melds them into a fantasy wasteland where throngs battle each other over land and sea. In a civilized turn-based fashion, of course.
It's become a popular gaming cliché over the past several years that Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) are dead. Maybe they're just resting, waiting for more players to discover them. Atlus is hoping that is indeed the case, giving a new lease on life to Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, a free-to-play MMORPG installment of the popular MegaTen franchise.
Stop me if you've heard this one before: a family member has gone missing and you'll need to travel to a location from your past to find them while being tracked by an evil entity. In the world of hidden object games, that setup should sound incredibly familiar due to its overuse, and in Malice: Two Sisters, it's the exact storyline we're once again presented with.
Sometimes a game does nothing wrong, technically speaking, but still comes up wanting. MMO strategy game Illyriad is a prime example - everything from the game's interface to its resource-building is standard free-to-play strategy game fare, none of it too intrusive. The only problem? It focuses so hard on playing it safe, it forgets to deliver something worth playing.
The Orneon development team has not one, but three successful franchises going for them: Agency of Anomalies, Echoes of the Past and Secrets of the Dark. At this point, they could well be considered experts of the hidden object genre. But just in case some doubters remain, this month Orneon brings us yet another excellent title—the second in the globe-trotting Secrets of the Dark series—a toothsome, Thai-spiced adventure called Eclipse Mountain.