Given the plethora of weekend sales, this week’s new apps may find it difficult to battle for your attention. However, for those of you looking for some new apps to sink your teeth into here are some of this week’s most promising looking fresh faces.
This week I want to start off by highlighting some apps that are taking an awesome approach to supporting both the iPhone and iPad in separate releases. While I’d firmly argue that a single universal app would be the most ideal way to go, there are several reasons (not just monetary) why it’s in a developer’s interest to release separate iPad and iPhone apps. On multiple occasions I have pleaded with the development community to at least make the “iPad” release a universal app, so iDevice owners with small and larger form factor devices wouldn’t have to re-buy the same game twice. Well, it looks like my pleas are being answered, as we have no fewer than four developers doing just this!
The first is a new physics based platformer from publisher Chillingo called Red Ball 3. Then there is Jump Birdy Jump, the cute looking physics-based puzzle/platformer game which was “hand-crafted by a guy in his garage after 19 weeks of eating nothing but ramen”. Demolition Dash is a destruction endurance game with character and the debut release from German development studio, dreamfab. Finally Com2uS releases a great contender in the somewhat crowded Tower Defense game genre. I was fortunate enough to beta test Tower Defense®: Lost Earth and it offers a serious amount of content for its slightly higher than average price tag. Tower Defense fans will definitely want to consider this one.
Get your engines going and those pedals spinning, next up we have a couple of nice looking racing games and Illusion Labs takes on BMX. First, Bjango offers up Sideways Racing, a feature-packed top-down single player iPad-only title. The other racing title is David Linan’s Hard Racing, a top-down racer which puts you in control of a classic Camaro and features photo-realistic graphics and allows you compete in 8 different events. Finally, from Illusion Labs, the creators of the innovative finger skateboarding experience Touchgrind, comes Touchgrind BMX, which brings similar gameplay mechanics to the world of BMX, allowing you to pull off realistically rad bike tricks and stunts with just your fingers.
HotGen Ltd burst onto the iOS scene this week with a brilliant looking debut, a new platformer called To-Fu: The Trials of Chi, starring of all things, a block of tofu! With over 100 levels, it being a universal app, and a launch price of 99¢ this one could be a difficult one to pass up. A trio of indie Spanish devs (Unboring, Trackglobe and Ivanovich Games) released a great puzzle game called Blupt!, starring a cute Cyclopic monster who loves soda. I reviewed this game earlier in the week and it earned a “Great” 4 star rating. Rounding out the puzzle games is Donut Games’ 27th title, a ball rolling and sorting game with a little Mexican flare, appropriately titled Mexiball. And from tap tap tap (the developers of Camera+) comes The Heist, a game that offers 4 varieties of classic puzzles which must be solved to crack a vault and earn a cool real-world prize. The developers have done some rather neat things visually with this game to create a neat interactive experience, so its no surprise the game has been rocketing up the App Store charts.
Last, but not least, Diigo Inc released a slick looking new free web browser app for the iPad called iChromy, which is styled after Google’s Chrome browser.
As always, please leave a comment below letting us know what new releases you picked up this week.
