Bullet Asylum Windows Phone
This game helped me realise something about myself. It’s made me gain a greater understanding of my own gaming tastes. I used to think that I liked tower defence games, but playing BulletAsylum has driven home the fact that, quite simply, I like defence games of all kinds. So it is that I like
tower defence games; so it is that I fell in love with the old PC strategy game Stronghold; so it is that I have a place in my heart for Dungeon Keeper, Evil Genius and Tecmo’s Deception games – any title that allows me to set traps for my enemies; and so it is that I’ve fallen for BulletAsylum’s charms.
BulletAsylum, you see, is a game all about defence. In fact, it’s a game which owes everything to one of the earliest ‘defence’ games – the Atari classic Missile Command. Like that game, this is a title all about using ground-based defences to ward of an aerial assault, where the trajectory and range of your shots is always important to consider, and where quick reactions are essential. Where BulletAsylum differs (aside from the less foreboding nomenclature) is in its attitude: Missile Command was a frantic but considered affair, with its elegant system of explosions in the sky and inexorably falling bombs making it a game fraught with cold war tension. BulletAsylum, on the other hand, is pure adrenaline.
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Curling3D Windows Phone
What a name! I remember when the label of 3D was thrown around with gay abandon: SWIV 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Lemmings 3D, Prince of Persia 3D… Polygons were the future, and boy were developers keen to point out that they were using them. Of course, at least most cases of this phenomenon had the good graces to belong to pre-existing franchises, so that proclaiming their 3D-ness was a good way to emphasise the way in which they diverged from their predecessors.
Nowadays the use of the term in a game seems quaint – even on smartphones, the use of 3D graphics is hardly a rarety, so its inclusion seems unusual to draw attention to. Particularly in a game which, well, manages to be quite so plain-looking as Curling3D. Nevertheless, graphics and nomenclature are hardly the most important aspects of a game. What does Curling3D offer for its £2.99 price-point?
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Fall of God windows Phone
The Fall of Gods is-
The Fall of Gods is a game where-
The Fall of Gods is a game where you control a boy on a heroic quest. That is, assuming that-
The Fall of Gods is a game, where you control a boy on a heroic quest. That is, assuming that you get past the game’s propensity to crash, freeze up, stop responding to input or otherwise fail, forcing you to restart.
Sometimes these errors come during a moment of non-interactive animation. Sometimes they come after one. Sometimes they occur when you have the temerity to bring up a menu option. One thing’s for certain: they will occur, and they will do so sooner rather than later. Stop-start doesn’t begin to cover it.
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Fragger Windows Phone
Would you like to play a game of a style you’ve seen many times before? Would you also like to pay £2.29 for the privilege? Then you’ve come to the right place.
Fragger is quite simply, yet another object-launching-game. This time it’s the adaptation of an iPhone adaptation of a free Flash-based online game. Fragger sees you, well, fragging enemies – dressed as cartoony terrorists – by lobbing grenades at them. Nothing more, nothing less.
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buzzwords windows phone
Word creation games are hardly unusual on smartphones – which means it’s lucky that I love them. Even luckier for me, they’re generally very easy to review: pretty much everyone has played some sort of word-creation game in their life, so I can rely on my readers having a solid foundation of knowledge to work with.
It’s no surprise, then, that I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone who doesn’t enjoy putting words together. Hate Scrabble? This probably isn’t the game for you.
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Bug Village Windows Phone
It’s a free Live game!
Only it isn’t, not really. It’s a ‘free’ game in the same way that Farmville and countless other Facebook titles are ‘free’ – that is to say that you don’t have to pay to play the game, but you won’t get very far without doing so. For anyone familiar with the types of game I’m talking about, what I’m about to describe won’t come as a surprise, but this is how the game works:
You’re given a small amount of materials for constructing items – buildings for your ‘bug village’. You’re also given a tiny amount of coins. These coins are used to pay for special objects, and to hurry actions up. Something you’ll want to do a lot, as even the most basic action takes a long time – the average building takes an hour to construct. A bug can collect a small amount of materials from a pile (which you have to pay materials to construct) in fifteen minutes, while more significant quantities take either two or six hours. Presented with activity times of this length you’ll quickly find yourself reaching for the ‘hurry’ button in order to get anything done.
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Rune Legend Windows Phone
Fit all the shapes in the spaces. A statement which accurately describes this game. Perhaps more significantly, a statement which it wouldn’t be unfair to reduce the game down to: it really is that simple a release.
Presented with a row of blocks, you have to cram them all into a cavity. The challenge is in working out where to place them, and in what orientation; starting with small areas to fill with only a handful of pieces, the game builds up in scale, leading to larger areas with more pieces, making it ever harder to plan in advance where to place them. It gradually becomes a real challenge, and just as it gets into its stride… it stops. Faced with a system easy to extend – designing levels to fit the small range of blocks on offer shouldn’t be too hard – the developers chose instead to focus on a small number of levels. Which would be fine, were they particularly well-designed, but as it stands they all feel rather generic.
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ARMED! Windows Phone
If there’s one truly positive impact that the rise of mobile gaming has had, it’s been the resurgence of
casual turn-based war games. A genre in decline on the home computers from the moment Westwood Studios put out Dune 2, their requirements for high strategic thinking but little in the way of quick responses make them a perfect fit for the smaller screens and limited interfaces of mobile devices.
December saw the release of Sickhead Games’ ARMED!, a multiplayer-focussed, turn-based strategy game. Boasting a graphics engine that would look good on an Xbox Live-certified title, I was curious to see whether the game would live up to its engine – or indeed to its £2.99 price tag.
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