Usually when you're ready to release a new mobile game, you do the 21st-century equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops. Some people do prefer a stealthier approach though, which is why we virtually stumbled across Dragons of Atlantis: Heirs of the Dragon on the Canadian App Store. It's a spin-off from the Dragons of Atlantis online game, and it's getting ready to spread its wings and fly to iOS devices worldwide.
If you had an imaginary friend as a child, you may understand the frustration of others not sharing that same imagination. Now, what if those imaginary friends were real, were gods, and only you could see them? That's the premise behind Bonds of the Skies, Kemco's newest Android RPG. It provides a story about the relationship between humans and gods, and wraps it up in a traditional turn-based RPG.
From the minds that brought you Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny comes Quadropus Rampage, a bizarre, vaguely Rogue-like brawler starring a four-limbed cephalopod with a penchant for hitting things.
Sometimes originality is overrated. By that I mean it's entirely possible just to cherry pick the best ideas from previous works, add in your own clever story and dialogue and voila: you've got yourself a great game. Ecol Tactics Online almost proves my point, taking bits from JRPGs, MMOs and tactical battle games and very nearly turning them into something wonderful.
Surely no genre has weathered the ups and downs of Facebook gaming quite like the city building strategy hybrid. Just when we as players think it's dead or that we've seen every possible variation of the template we could possibly see - boom - it returns to mock us for our lack of faith. Its resilience likely lies in the fact that these games are just so fun when all the elements work. Take Kingdom Knights. I jumped into this cartoony strategy game with apathy, but before I knew it, an hour had passed and I was still eager to see where it'd take me.
The ninjas of Ninja Village aren't exactly what you'd expect of deadly assassins. In keeping with Kairosoft tradition, they're tiny, pixellated and actually kind of cute, and they spend most of their time bringing in crops, cutting wood and hanging out at the local tea house. They don't dress in black pajamas and hoods, although you can buy and equip them with hoods if you like, and they won't be scaling castle walls or disappearing in clouds of magical smoke. Mostly, they're just people living their lives in a small village.
Usually dungeon crawling can be a pretty long-winded affair. I mean, first you have to get all of your equipment on, and then you have to inch your way through every dimly-lit cavern, making sure you always keep your eyes peeled for possible loot. In most cases, it's likely you won't make it home for dinner half the time, especially when a quest is particularly harrowing. That's why I'm so excited about Dungeonism, a unique and bite-sized version of the age-old dungeon crawler, but with a lot of heart and plenty of quick strategic thinking.
When our lives get chaotic—say, traffic snarls up, work becomes frantic, or our toddler decides he or she is going to strip naked and tear down a city street in the middle of winter—we tend to say, "Man! Life is a zoo!" As it so happens, we humans really have no idea what it's like to live out the zoo life. ZooVale, an upcoming cross-platform social RPG, should give us a glimpse of what it's like to live as part of an exotic menagerie—though you can still expect some inaccuracies, like animals that walk upright. Animals don't walk upright. Not while we're looking, anyway.