With the sheer volume of new releases each week, it is often a daunting task to select a handful (or two) to feature as Notable New Releases. This week I settled on twelve titles that span just about every possible genre (and price-level).
Deal hunters will find a lot to love about FuzzyCube Software’s freemium football-themed target shooting game iQuarterback 2 and PopCap Games’ cute locomotive track and candy collecting game appropriately titled Candy Train. Electronic Arts released a cute looking casual game called Draw Jump, which mixes elements of Doodle Jump and Karuki Rescue. Players draw lines with a finger swipe, which then turn into trampolines for Cosmo the rocket to use to climb higher and higher.
Publisher Chillingo is firing on all cylinders this week, releasing a total of three games (Ink Ball™, Storm in a Teacup and Orions 2), the first of which was under its clickgamer shingle. Ink Ball™ is a stylized puzzle game that sees players using a mixture of elastic and rigid ink bars to guide a stream of ink around various obstacles and spills, trying to get it safely into the inkwell before time runs out. Storm in a Teacup is a platformer, that from what I hear, is much more difficult that it’s cutesy graphics may lead you to believe. Finally Orions 2 is the sequel to Chillingo’s popular fantasy card strategy game Orions: Legend of Wizards.
In this Capitalist society, where would we be without product tie-ins? For the kids THQ has released Kung Fu Panda 2: Be The Master a tie-in to the upcoming Dreamworks film. The game features multiple play modes, including one that is rather similar to Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja. Team Hot Wheels Flame Riders™ bring everyone’s favorite little metal cars to your iPhone in a high-speed track drawing game where you are in control of a series of high flying stunt cars. Days Of Wonder brings the international boardgame sensation Ticket to Ride to the iPad. Finally, Namco goes after wrestling fans with TNA Wrestling iMPACT! which features 24 TNA Superstars in local and online multiplayer battles.
Moving right along, this week we have three titles that offer something a little new and different and are brimming with their own character and style. First is Bumpy Road from Simogo, an arcade game where you must safely guide an older couple as they go for a ride, collecting the memories of their past. The game features a cool new control mechanic where instead of directly interacting with the characters, you modify the ground to push them around. Port 127’s Hipster City Cycle is unltimately a pixel art love song to the city of Philadelphia. Jaden reviewed this bike racer and gave it a “Great” 4-star rating. Finally, we have Casey’s Contraptions for the iPad, the much anticipated collaboration between Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut. It is a physics-based puzzle game in a similar vein as The Impossible Machine and it too earned a “Great” 4-star rating when Kyle reviewed it earlier this week.
Finally, for those of you with an appetite for RPGs, you can pick up the sixth Choose Your Own Adventure/RPG-lite gamebook from Tin Man Games, Gamebook Adventures 6: The Wizard from Tarnath Tor for a special low launch price of $2.99. Or for those with big wallets, there are separate iPhone and iPad releases of Chaos Rings Omega, the latest installment in SQUARE ENIX’s globally successful Chaos Rings RPG series, for $11.99 and $14.99 respectively.
As always, please leave a comment below letting us know what new releases you picked up this week.
