The Mac App Store, still fairly young at time of writing, is home to a lot of ports, both of PC download titles as well as iOS titles. Some are great, but others… Stripe Physics is part of the "others." A simple physics puzzler, Stripe Physics tasks you with carefully dropping a ball to a platform by removing various geometric shapes by clicking on them. A physics engine makes things fall, collide and move in ways you ought to expect.
How far are you willing to go for a tasty dinner? Do you wake up dreaming about it? Do you risk life and limb on a regular basis so you can make sure you've snagged the freshest meal possible? Are you a spider? If your answer to that last question was "no", then rest easy; the new iPhone game Spider Jack hast that bit covered.
There are a lot of really good bubble-pop match-3 games on Facebook, which makes it all the more impressive that Bubble Saga still manages to feel especially noteworthy. Where most bubble-pop games use 2D graphics, Bubble Saga uses an entirely browser-based 3D graphics engine that models the bubbles as solid objects with appropriate physics. This may sound like a very minor change, but it makes Bubble Saga feel like a very different and perhaps more engaging game than 2D-based bubble-pop games like, say, Wooga's Bubble Island.
Rotastic is an upcoming arcade/puzzle game with a simple one-button gameplay mechanic based on swinging to collect items, escape deadly traps and foes (like robotic metal ghosts and enormous flying piranhas), send your opponents flying to their doom, smash bricks, execute aerial acrobatics, or top the fastest speedruns."
Magical Mysteries: Path of the Sorceress makes an intriguing promise: use your Match-3 skills in a new way to search for enchanted scrolls, make useful potions, and defeat your mysterious enemies! Yet while it's a decent game, it's not quite as impressive as it sounds, and all that exciting scroll-searching and potion-brewing isn't really new at all but just slight variations of the same old stuff.
First we were told to Cut the Rope. Then we were told to Burn the Rope. Finally, someone's gone and pushed it to the utmost. Now we're being told to Burn It All in a new puzzle game from the makers of Pix'n Love Rush. Frankly, the heat feels pretty good.
Hidden object games have always been a little hit or miss for me. I typically enjoy them at the start, but over time grow bored once I learn the designers tricks and know what to look for. Also, there's rarely reason for replay, leaving these games as a one time play experience. Play Kalei, then, has seemed to drop out of the sky and break all those preconceptions, taking a standard genre and turning it on its ear. I'm happy about this.
Full Fat seems incapable of putting a bad game out on the App Store. Titles like Flick Golf! and Zombie Flick have earned the developer a lot of love. Full Fat's latest title, Coin Drop, continues the quality trend, though it's pretty different from the company's previous games.