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Daily iPhone App: Star Marine Infinite Ammo
Glitchsoft's oddly-titled Star Marine: Infinite Ammo (more on why that's weird in a moment) is both good at bad. First, it's good at heart. Star Marine: Infinite Ammo is a Contra-style run-and-gun title that has you controlling a soldier on a spaceship among other environments. Your job is to fight through hordes of aliens and escape. The action is great and fans of the old Contra game will find a lot to enjoy. However, Star Marine has a few unfortunate issues. First of all, the controls are a little more wonky than they should be. For example, the action often gets fast and furious. When things heated up in Contra, you could duck and jump out of the way reliably. Star Marine's touch controls, by contrast, don't always get you where you need to go. I got hit by several stray bullets and alien flyers because the controls weren't quite as tight as they should be. Repetition is also an issue. While the environment options eventually expand, the first few levels are basically the same hallways and enemies over and over. An enjoyable boss battle becomes drudgery after you've done it several times. The freemium-style in-app purchase system doesn't help, either. When you discover a gun you haven't unlocked with gems you've collected, you just plain don't get it. Plus, the gems come way too slowly. If this was a freemium game, the rate might be acceptable (and I fully expect it to drop to free at some point), but for the current price of US$1.99, it's too slow. I've got one more complaint. For a game called "Infinite Ammo," there's only one gun I found that was truly infinite. Everything else, including weapons you can buy, health packs and special attacks, are limited. Despite those issues, Star Marine: Infinite Ammo can be fun. There's even a Boss Rush and Survival Mode to enjoy after you've finished the main campaign. I don't know that I'd recommend it at the $1.99 price, but this game seems made to be discounted, so keep an eye out for it. At a slightly cheaper price (or maybe if the freemium system is tweaked to be a little more forgiving), Star Machine: Infinite Ammo has a lot more going for it.
Daily iPad App: Triple Town
Triple Town was originally a Facebook game, so it does have some weird freemium elements that are kind of annoying: There are some weird turn mechanics where you actually need to "buy" turns, either with in-game gold or real money, that can get annoying after a while. And the graphics themselves do look as though they were created with HTML 5 -- they're serviceable, but the game definitely doesn't take advantage of all of the power of your iOS device. All of that said, however, Triple Town still comes with this sparkling recommendation: I first fired it up late one night last week before going to bed at 3 am, and found myself still playing it two hours later. It is a really incredible take on the match-3 genre: instead of switching items around, you instead place them down on the board, and then three of any kind (in any direction) will automatically combine into one of the next kind up the hierarchy, so grass combines into bushes which combines into trees, then houses, and so on. Bears appear on the screen and need to be blocked out into tombstones, which then combine into churches, which combine into larger churches which can earn extra points. The game is turn-based and simple to play, but very tough to master, and it has that extremely addictive "just one more turn" quality. Triple Town is really a great title -- it doesn't quite outgrow its Facebook roots, but there's more than enough game here that it's definitely worth the free, universal download. Just be careful starting it up late at night -- you might find yourself losing as much sleep as I did.
Daily iPhone App: Early Bird
Booyah is a company, originally founded by ex-Blizzard guys, that made some big steps in the relatively early days of the App Store with its social game MyTown. Since then, it looks like the development over there has taken a turn for the more traditional. Early Bird is the studio's latest product, and it's a physics-based puzzle platformer that's actually more similar to golf than anything else. The idea is that you control a bird by swiping across the screen (Did I mention that Booyah has gone a little more traditional? At least it's not angry), trying to make your way across a level to a target where a worm has taken up residence. Get there in fewer swipes than the game offers for each level, and you'll be the early bird, with a star rating to match. Run out of swipes, and you've got to start the level over. This one checks pretty much all the marks -- the graphics and sound are cute, the gameplay is solid (though the swiping mechanic is a little simple), and there are plenty of rewards to go after, from that aforementioned rating to bonuses for landing right on the target and so on. Both Game Center and OpenFeint integration are included, and there's apparently more content coming soon. The game is just US 99 cents for iPhone, or there's a $1.99 HD version out for iPad as well. Early Bird's not quite as risky or groundbreaking as Booyah's other titles, but it's a solid game for sure, and shows that when Booyah wants to focus strictly on hitting the right market with a well-made game, they can do just that.
Daily iPhone App: Roboto
Roboto is a solid platformer for iOS that features you controlling a little robot around a series of levels, 30 in all. Gameplay is pretty strictly action/exploration based, very much in the vein of Super Mario Bros., though the robot has a few extra movies that Mario didn't have. Specifically, he can glide for a short amount of time, as well as switch gravity as certain points, which adds a little more complexity to your search for golden gears throughout the game. Other than that, this one plays as you'd expect, and the general polish and quality makes it stand out among the many various platformers available on iOS. The one issue I had was with the on-screen thumbstick -- it's almost too close to the left edge of the iPhone's screen, so whenever I headed left, it would drop off and stop my movement, sometimes right over a gap. Other than that, though, controls are precise and intuitive, which is what you want in a platformer like this. Roboto is available in an HD version that's universal across iPhone and iPad, complete with OpenFeint and Game Center integration, and a whole bunch of minigames and unlockable powerups and weapons. It's a solid buy, even at the current price of $3.99.
