Z0MB1ES (on teh ph0ne) Windows Phone
I MAED A GAEM W1TH Z0MB1ES 1N IT!!1 is, for the uninitiated, a twin stick shooter on the Xbox Live Indie Games service (
click ). Not only that, it’s the best selling Xbox Live Indie Game, having raked in hundreds of thousands of purchases since its release. Presumably, then, it’s got something going for it.
Well, first up, don’t expect anything like the elegant destruction of Geometry Wars, here. No, I MAED A GAEM… isn’t interested in such things. It doesn’t care for elegance or refinement. It recognises the most fulfilling aspect of frantic arena shooters – that they offer exhilarating, cathartic destruction – and figures that the best way to serve that attribute is not to envelop it in subtle concepts and clever ideas, but to succumb to the wild side and make something raucous, loud and dumb. And strike me down if it doesn’t succeed.
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Galactic Overlord Windows Phone
What is war? War is the struggle to control territory. There may well be ideological, economic, political motives, but in the end it boils down to this: the desire to control an area. Galactic Overlord recognises this, being a strategy game in which war is abstracted to its simplest form, an abstracted struggle for territory. No worrying about the nuances of battle or diplomacy, it represents a land-grab, pure and simple.
Well, when I say ‘it’ represents a land grab, I do of course mean its genre – Galactic Overlord is far from the first of its kind, with many other games (going back to a free web browser based game whose name, frustratingly, eludes me) using the exact same core mechanic. What it offers over its competitors is simple: availability on Windows Phone. Fortunately, that’s not all it has going for it.
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Spider Jack Windows Phone
Spider Jack
Spiders have been having something of a gaming renaissance recently, with them being the heroes of Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, this title and… well, alright, so that’s it, but these are spiders we’re talking about. They have to take what they can get. Two fairly major mobile games are better than nothing.
Both Spider Jack and The Secret of Bryce Manor realise the same thing: that spiders make for great smartphone protagonists thanks to their scuttling, web-spinning ways. Fortunately, they also realise that there are different ways to make use of those abilities. So it is that Spider Jack is a dinky little puzzle game of swinging and climbing, all about shooting your web at right target in the right moment in order to collect stars and get to your lunch while avoiding the myriad obstacles in your way. The controls are beautifully simple: tap on a point to launch your web at it, swipe across the web to cut it. And that’s it! Jack will climb up any shot string, while gravity causes it to swing as expected, allowing you to launch it across lengths of the screen with a well-timed swipe should you so wish, or to swing from point to point with multiple taps.
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Legends Of Descent Windows Phone
Alright, so it may have a title which sounds like it was created using the Generic Fantasy Game Name Generator™. It may have characters and enemies which look like they’ve fallen out of Poser’s templates without so much as a touch up. It may appear to be little more than a lazy copy of Diablo’s gameplay… well, alright, it
is little more than a lazy copy of Diablo’s gameplay. But aside from all that, it’s, well, it’s free. And a lazy clone of Diablo. Which means it at least inherits some of that game’s compulsive elements. Namely the urge to level up further and collect more loot.
A shame it loses all the nuance that makes the Diablo series special. Admittedly, matching up to Blizzard’s huge, dedicated teams and budgets was never going to be on the cards, not in a small, free effort like this. But even so, this is a game of overwhelming simplicity. It has no storyline to speak of, no world to care about. Even Diablo’s simpler predecessors, from Rogue and on, place you as a lone adventure, questing into a dungeon in pursuit of treasure and glory. In Legends of Descent, you’re a dwarf stranded in a dungeon, wandering through it aimlessly. A dungeon which inexplicably features unmolested shopkeepers and blacksmiths at every level.
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Dreadnoughts Defense Windows Phone
Dreadnoughts Defense is, as you might have guessed from the name, a tower defence game. It was released a few weeks ago, but we agreed not to publish a review at the time as it had teething problems which the developers said they would address (namely that the game would sporadically fail to recognise my input, making it unplayable in the more frantic levels). Weeks, and several patches, have passed, I’m finally in a position to review it. Was it worth the wait?
Well. It’s an unusual case. Dreadnoughts Defense certainly appears to have quite a bit of time and money poured into it. It features high resolution, 2D graphics; short introductions to each level where an illustrated advisor explains the story and any new weapons or enemies you’ll encounter; and its own set of in-game ‘achievements’ (not being an Xbox Live title these aren’t the Gamerscore bothering kind, of course). It’s also a game whose advertisements you may have seen adorning websites, not least our own. Quite clearly, the developers were hoping to make a splash with this.
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Breeze Windows Phone
A game about guiding a flower through levels using the wind/tilt controls. That’ll sound familiar to any fans of the (wonderful) PSN title Flower, but this is a very different beast. Breeze is, essentially, an inertia-driven obstacle course; a reskinned marble run.
The aim is simple – get your flower from its start to the finish line, possibly picking up a set number of glowing orbs along the way. You do this using one of two control methods – tilt controls (which work, as already mentioned, exactly like a marble run), or using a touch-induced breeze. The latter deserves further explanation, as it’s implemented in an interesting way. Rather than using a virtual stick or similar, the game simply causes a breeze to be generated, blowing in the direction of the flower, from wherever you place your finger; so placing your finger to the left of the flower will cause it to be blown right, and so on. This system also means that the closer your finger to the flower, the faster it moves, as the breeze has less chance to dissipate; the downside being that the closer to the flower you are, the harder to make subtle movements and direct it accurately.
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MiniSquadron Windows Phone
Well, this is about as old school as they come. A side-scrolling dogfighter, this isn’t MiniSquadron’s first sortie: it’s been available on iPhone and Android for a good while now, and seems to have been quite well received. The question is: is its reputation deserved, and is it a good conversion?
Let’s tackle the issue of quality first. As already stated, this is a very traditional type of game – you control a propeller plane (or, occasionally, a UFO, but they control identically) and have to shoot down others. Taking place on a 2D plane (the other sort), you use a virtual stick to manoeuvre your plane, with it altering its pitch to suit: that is to say, pulling its nose up or pushing it down. Invert your aircraft and it automatically rolls to right itself, allowing you to switch direction without having to fly upside down.
Complicating matters are issues you might expect when dogfighting: your plane has a maximum flight ceiling, trying to exceed which will cause you to stall – to lose control as your aircraft ploughs towards the earth, requiring you to put it into a dive to regain speed. Fail to do so at the right moment and bam! You’re toast. Similarly, flying at low altitudes is risky, or even pulling up while in a dogfight – enemy attacks can and will cause your aircraft to jerk in different directions and slow down, potentially putting you into a stall at low altitudes, or simply pointing your plane in the ground’s direction at an inopportune moment.
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CraftWorld Windows Phone
Whereupon the noble developers come to appreciate the value in being first. Craft World, you see, is not just a clone of Minecraft. It is the
second clone of Minecraft to make it onto Windows Phone 7, and so finds itself being directly compared with
Survivalcraft, a clone released in November. This is particularly problematic for Craft World as both it and Survivalcraft share a similar approach to release – they have been put on sale in an early, unfinished form, with the promise of continual updates over their lives, adding functionality and generally bringing the experience closer to that of Minecraft proper. Which is to say: Survivalcraft has been receiving iterative updates for over a month now, while Craft World is just getting started.
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Morgan Appleby
Ashutosh
Max
Vitaly
schlubadub
DeepakMT
Gambit
harry
