It seems like almost every week now, mobile gamers are treated to yet another developer's attempt at recapturing the magic of the Pokemon series. And why wouldn't they try? After all, I haven't met another gamer who could deny the lasting appeal of scouring the countryside and battling your way to the top with a crew of fun-loving creatures who quickly become your friends.
I'm familiar with what it means to belong to a genre. I understand that when a given genre contains multiple titles, those titles will share certain similarities. What I still don't quite get, however, is why I've played Merlin's Rage three separate times now. Each time it was a different title with different art assets, but the core game has been exactly the same. I mean it's fun, but what the heck?
We've seen a lot of games about trains lately here on Gamezebo. And what's not to love? Train tracks just seem to be the perfect element to complement a puzzle game. Conversely, we've also seen a disappointing lack of games to feature the West African setting of Timbuktu. But thankfully, Last Train to Timbuktu, the debut brain-teasing puzzler from Green-Eyes Games is here to bring us the best of both worlds!
Who doesn't love a good old first-person puzzler to whittle a Sunday afternoon away, hey? Pulse Shift promises literal twists and turns, as you make your way around a variety of platforms and obstacles, all simply by rotating your view 90 degrees at a time, and in turn changing the direction in which gravity is pulling.
Shapes are getting awfully uppity these days. Curiosity's cube demands consistent tapping on a global scale, Super Hexagon attempts to steal the title of "most dangerous game" from humanity, and now PUK - Pull Back & Ping is pitting gamers against deceptively challenging circles. But circles don't even have corners, you say...how tough could they be?
Some ideas never seem to get old. Zombies, for instance, seem to hold an endless fascination for us, and time management games seem to have a similarly evergreen appeal. In 2012, Anino Games bundled the two concepts into one ghoulishly frantic package in Grave Mania: Undead Fever, and this year they bring us the sequel to that game, Grave Mania: Pandemic Pandemonium. While this new offering's not significantly different from its predecessor, it does offer a more streamlined approach to time management.
There are some really exciting outbursts of creativity happening in video games when it comes to the first person perspective at the moment. Most recently Perspective blew my mind, sowed it back together again with fuse wire, and then blew it all over again. Now Antichamber has come along and proceeded to deal with that stubborn bit of my mind that refused to enter the stratosphere.