Gamezebo
Open main menu
Search

Tag: Survival

  • Naughty Kitties Preview
    Upcoming
    • iOS
    Naughty Kitties Preview

    By

    On the distant Cat's Planet, a war is waging.  An army of blobby alien invaders, cozy and confident in their heavily-armed spaceships, are attempting to invade.  While they've come equipped with lasers, mines, and missiles, the cats refuse to surrender.  In an attempt to protect their home world and everything they hold dear—naps and snacks—the cats take to the air and fight back.This fight is the basis for Coconut Island's upcoming strategic runner, Naughty Kitties.  One part tower defense, one part endless runner, and all parts adorable, Naughty Kitties successfully combines twitchy reaction gaming with a need for pre-planning and forethought.  Each play is a distance-scored run graded by how many kilometers your kitties' ship manages to fly before being destroyed.  On the destroying end of that equation are the alien attackers, flying at and into your ship with guns blazing and bombs exploding, continuously reducing your ship's health meter with each direct hit."The defense comes from your band of kitties, who are outnumbered but far from outgunned.  Kitty units are stationed on the ever-hurtling spaceship by dragging them from the deck at the bottom of the screen to one of the artillery posts on the ship's hull.  There are always three kitties available to choose from, so long as you didn't just assign a kitty—if so, you'll have to wait a few seconds for that unit to reload with a new, randomly selected feline.  You can also discard from the deck by swiping a kitty aside, but you'll still have to wait for his spot to refresh.Each type of kitty is a specific class, and you have to pick your available units before going into flight.  Kitties' specialties vary from firing missiles to ship repair, but all have a place in battle.  Michale, the Rambo-wannabe orange tabby, fires eggs from a machine gun at high speed.  Catzilla, usually half-asleep in his favorite pot, launches powerful-yet-slow fish-bone bombs.  Chou-chou, the always-essential mechanic, is actually an alpaca who believes he is a cat, but that's close enough for the nondiscriminatory cat army.
  • NBA Rush Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    NBA Rush Review

    By

    You would think that the life of an NBA player is stressful enough trying to figure out how to dethrone LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and the Miami Heat. But no, we're asking them to fend off alien invasions too. If you think I'm just babbling incoherently, you need to check out NBA Rush, a competent but unspectacular endless runner made notable mostly by the unusual premise I just laid out.Granted, RenRen Games could have made this just another sports-themed runner, so the devs get props for coming up with something different. Yet it's never really explained why NBA stars would be the proper people to help fight off the aliens, except, I guess, that they look more like super heroes than mere athletes thanks to the game's angular, stylized art.No matter. The game gets you right into the action with controls very familiar to anyone who's ever played anything in this genre: swipe to either side to switch lanes, swipe up to jump, and swipe down to slide under certain obstacles. Notice how your player keeps his dribble going at all times? You wouldn't want to be called for traveling or double dribbling, even under these dire circumstances.Along the way, you'll be looking to pick up coins, but also to defeat the aliens whenever possible. The ones on the ground can be defeated by jumping on them, which also gives you a boost to get on top of otherwise unreachable places. Flying aliens are a little trickier, as you have to wait until you find a "DUNK" icon to be able to smash their flying saucers with some seriously aggressive jams.
  • Shiva: The Time Bender Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    Shiva: The Time Bender Review

    By

    Shiva: The Time Bender, the new endless runner from Tiny Mogul Games, works well as an introduction to the genre, but its lack of difficulty and shallow gameplay could turn off seasoned fans hoping for more substance.In Shiva: TTB, time may be the only thing on your side, as legions of enemies from history's most pitfall ridden locations do their worst in an attempt to thwart a punk rock caveman from capturing a plethora of crystal orbs littering the timescape…or something like that. The narrative isn't very important here, but it does tie in nicely with the game's main mechanic.The gameplay here is pretty standard stuff. Shiva - your player character - jogs, hops, and slays his way through time and space, all the while collecting brightly shining orbs that can be used to upgrade his appearance or weaponry by using the in-game market.The controls should be instantly familiar to anyone who has played an endless runner for a decent length of time: Tapping the left side of your touchscreen causes our green haired protag to hop in the air, and tapping the right side causes him to swing his mighty trident at any manner of foe that stands in his way. And what happens if he misses one of those swings or jumps? That's where the Time Bender mechanic comes into play.
  • Space Chicks Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Space Chicks Review

    By

    Let's get this out of the way right up front: Space Chicks is the next Jetpack Joyride. It's the next 'endless play, buy new upgrades, can't put it down' addiction that fits snuggly in your pocket. You're going to play it, love it, and curse this review for ever letting you know about it in the first place. It's a game that accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do - make you want to keep playing round after round.Space Chicks is an endless runner with a gravity-based twist. Like Canabalt, Jetpack Joyride, and the like, your little astronaut will run automatically, with jumps performed by a simple tap anywhere on the screen. What makes Space Chicks unique, though, is where your hero jumps to.In a move that seems to draw inspiration from physics-based games like Angry Birds Space, your astronaut will jump from planetoid to planetoid with each jump's trajectory affected by the pull of gravity. The object of the game is to successfully time your jumps to get from one planet to the next in a quest to rescue the titular chicks in space. 
  • Dragon Season Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Dragon Season Review

    By

    Wouldn't it be great to soar through the sky as a powerful dragon, feeling the wind whipping at your scales, and spitting out fireballs whenever something tries to get in the way of your peaceful voyage? Well now you'll actually get to see what that's like in Dragon Season, a quirky and colorful take on the endless running genre, where the skies are your friend, and the seasons are always in full bloom. But while the idea for the game is certainly cute, it won't be long before your dragon starts to lose a little bit of the steam that's powering up all of those fireballs. Boy, are my wings tired!At its core, Dragon Season is a 2D sidescrolling endless flier, as players guide a cutesy red dragon through a medieval landscape, collecting coins and breathing fire along the way. The flying mechanics might take a little getting used to at first, as your dragon moves upward in a curvy arc when ascending, and this can feel a little choppy for players who are just starting out on their dragon careers. You'll eventually fall into a groove though of tapping and holding on the screen when you want to gain altitude, and then quickly releasing your hold to drop back down and remain somewhere in the middle of the area."You can even run along the ground at times, so long as you find a clear stretch of land to do it on, and this proves to be another unique twist to the "don't touch the ground" formula in traditional endless flier experiences. Another button on the lower left-hand side of the screen allows you to shoot a fireball from your mouth, which comes in handy for blasting away the large chunks of castle walls that serve as obstacles throughout your adventure. All of these things are brought to life through a colorful art scheme, which incorporates just the right amount of blockiness and cartoony character designs to give Dragon Season a rich and lighthearted personality.
  • Miner Problem Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Miner Problem Review

    By

    Players don't have to settle when it comes to endless runners.  With the App Store already overflowing with options in this part-platformer, part-coffee break genre, new additions that lack substance will be washed out with the next inevitable rising tide of releases.  One of those new hopefuls, Miner Problem, is a playable runner with responsive controls and a charming, pixelated art style.  Unfortunately, it doesn't offer much beyond that.  Although it can be played without spending a dime, there are too many other, better options available to warrant investing time in this one.Our protagonist in Miner Problem is a lone, bomber-jacketed pickaxe jockey who has the misfortune of working in a vast mine prone to cave-ins.  Each run begins with his work being interrupted by the shudder of a soon-to-be-deadly rockslide, sending him sprinting for his life and any pieces of gold and diamonds he can snag along the way.  In standard endless runner fashion, the nameless blonde miner runs ever-onward automatically, leaving players with the task of jumping over obstacles by tapping the left side of the screen and tapping the right to utilize special abilities."Those abilities come from special pick-ups that our miner will randomly encounter during his sprint, deemed "events" in Miner Problem.  Each event is a suit or power that transforms our gold-digger into a teched-out version of himself.  For instance, the Skate event equips him with a Back to the Future-esque hoverboard that makes covering large chasms easier, Power puts him in a football player helmet that can ram through enemies and blockages, while Laser provides a jump-boosting laser gun and pair of sleek shades.  If these sound like the vehicle upgrades in Jetpack Joyride, it's because they are.  Miner Problem makes little secret of this, borrowing three events directly from Halfbrick's title—Jetpack, Gravity, and Robot—and even referencing its inspiration in multiple areas, from the game's icon to coins spelling out developer Cookiebit's initials à la the "HB" often encountered by Barry Steakfries.
  • Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Headless Review

    By

    Don't lose your head, but there's a new endless runner available in the App Store! What's that? You've already lost it, and now you're losing blood everywhere you go? Oh well, let's just - pardon the expression - run with it.Headless is a tribute to "Miracle Mike," who purportedly bled for 18 months following his decapitation. At least, that's how the game's title screen tells it. We're assuming that Mike was a chicken, as that's what you play as throughout this game. Well, most of Mike, anyway - as the name and tribute indicate, you're basically running for what's left of your life, minus your cranium, with blood splashing out all the while.Truth be told, the cartoonish blood loss is perhaps the most interesting thing about this game. As the chicken runs along, it's losing blood from a gauge measuring how much it has left. Along the way, there are items which look like filled bags from a blood bank (or messy ketchup packets - take your pick), that serve to replenish a portion of your constantly-depleting vital fluid.
  • Boson X Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    • PC
    Boson X Review

    By

    Boson X is essentially the spiritual sequel to glorious hair-pulling action game Super Hexagon. Cylindrically-shaped levels? Check. Fast-paced, randomly-generated action that keeps you on your toes every single moment of play? Check. A base difficulty so severe that you may accidentally smash your iPhone to pieces after you die for the umpteenth time? Oh yes, it's all there.But this rotational runner is far from just another Super Hexagon, as the game offers a massively unique take on the endless runner genre. The variety on show here is simply wonderful, and the difficulty factor coupled with the online leaderboards means that we'll no doubt be coming back for more again and again.You are a professor who has become caught in a massive particle accelerator. By jumping from platform to platform you can keep him safe from the high-energy particles dancing around him, and hopefully build up enough energy that you'll manage to discover some new particles along the way.