Wow, it has been another huge week of high quality big new releases from some of your favorite publishers. Chillingo starts things off and running with two new titles A.I.R Defense and (the long overdue) The Relic. A.I.R Defense (by Colourbox) is a frenetic, futuristic, neon vector-style, line drawing castle defense game where you must protect the Earth from alien attackers. The Relic (by Axolotl Studios) is a highly anticipated dungeon crawler which has been in development for quite some time. Using your axe and magical abilities you must hack ‘n slash your way through all manner of skeletons, spiders, wizards and more. In Oniric Games’ (iPad-only) platformer Elemental Rage HD, you take on the role of Huna, a young Spirit Guide in training, who must free the Elemental Spirits and save the world from a dismal fate. At $6.99 it is the most expensive notable title this week, but the beautiful cell shaded graphics have certainly peaked my interest.
There’s a bit more bloodshed as CAPCOM has released an all-new title in their Resident Evil franchise. The game, Resident Evil Mercenaries VS. is CAPCOM’s first online multiplayer iPhone title, allowing for all sorts of online match ups included 2 vs. 2 team matches, free-for-alls, or even 1 vs 1 teams battles. With multiple game modes, your choice of familiar characters from the series and plenty of stopping power, this may be an appealing departure for fans of the series.
EA Mobile is back this week with a port of the very popular PSN Mini title, Coconut Dodge from developer Futurlab. You take on the role of a cute little crab who is appropriately named, Clawrence. Moving side to side (like crabs do) dodging falling coconuts you collect treasures and attempt to keep a giant beach ball up in the air. Another title that might appeal to arcade/endurance fans is GAMEVIL’s latest effort which was developed by Enterfly Corporation, Air Penguin. You must simply tilt your device to help bounce, glide, slide and guide your penguin through the this Antarctic. There are 100 stages in Campaign Mode as well as an endurance style Survival Mode. With loads of Game Center achievements to be earned, Air Penguin looks like another addictive winner for GAMEVIL.
We have a couple more apps for those players looking for casual fare. NTT Resonant and Giab LLC have ported the extremely popular Flash-based tower defense game, GemCraft to iOS. The game combines RPG elements along with traditional tower defense gameplay to create 4 worlds and 32 levels of gameplay, each with 7 modes to unlock. A lite version is available as well. 2D Boy has released a new iPhone-only version of their award-winning puzzle game World of Goo. This week, they’ve also released an update to the existing (and more expensive) iPad-only version of the game, which makes it a Universal app. The folks at Noodlecake Games released a free version of (one of my favorite games of last year) Super Stickman Golf. This release of the off the wall golf game contains three courses (exclusive to this version) as well as three of the full game’s unlockable special power up balls, local achievements and leaderboards, and also supports the frenetic new online multiplayer play against other players with this free version of the game.
Jellyvision has launched separate iPhone and iPad releases of their unique brand of quiz show/trivia game, YOU DON’T KNOW JACK. Originally released for the PC on CD-ROM (remember those) in 1995, the franchise was recently revived, with a fantastic release on the consoles. Now it comes to the iOS platform (minus) a few features, like multiplayer play. Being a huge fan of the series, I can help but be excited about this release, even with some perceived possible shortcomings. There are lite versions of both the iPhone and iPad releases available as well to give you a taste of the gameplay.
Finally, despite Twitter’s efforts to put the kaibosh on third-party twitter clients on iOS, Tapbots released Tweetbot – A Twitter Client with Personality. I’ve only been using it for about a day now, but it is rather fantastic. Being the first release, there are still a few features which I’d like to see added (like landscape tweeting, ability to use your bit.ly creds, notification in timeline of tweets w/ replies), but overall it is a very slick, intuitive and customizable twitter app that I’d definitely recommend checking out.
As always, please leave a comment below letting us know what new releases you picked up this week.
