Spider-Man:Total Mayhem, the action-packed, comic book-inspired title from Gameloft, is now available from the app store. While Spider-Man is a typical Gameloft offering right down to the weak storylines and questionable voice acting, it also contains the most important one of all: it’s a polished, console-style game that’s flat out fun to play.
Rimelands: Hammer of Thor [$4.99] is a new tactical turn-based RPG from developers Dicework and Crescent Moon Games (of Ravensword [$3.99/Lite] fame). We previewed a hands-on video of the game about a month ago that explained how the turn-based combat worked as well as showcasing some of the games many items and weapons. With Rimelands now available, we've been able to experience these first hand, and came away impressed with how well the different elements of the game come together. The dice-rolling combat mechanic gives it an old school pen-and-paper feel, while the dungeon crawling and loot collection offers plenty to discover in the game. Couple that with an interesting story and top-notch visuals, and Rimelands is one of the best RPG experiences you can have on the iPhone.
Humans have squandered the resources of the world, throwing off the balance of the ecosystem and turning their once beautiful lands into an uninhabitable frozen wasteland. They are forced to move into underground vaults for a thousand years, and when they finally emerge they find that a new race called the Fair Folk have taken over the dominant role above ground. Humans try to reclaim their territory, and war ensues. An uneasy peace is finally reached between the two sides, and they are able to precariously coexist together above ground. This leaves countless underground vaults filled with treasures of the last millennium, ready to be explored and exacted by you, treasure hunter Rose Cristo.
The story in Rimelands sets the stage perfectly for a dungeon crawling adventure. You'll play the role of Rose as she travels to the many towns and vaults in Rimelands discovering treasures, completing quests, and evolving her character with the multitude of items and abilities available. The game is played from an isometric viewpoint and combat and movement are grid-based. This can take some getting used to as you're only able to move in four directions rather than being able to move around the world freely. Coming within striking distance of an enemy allows you to engage in the turn-based combat which is a mixture of long-ranged and melee attacks. An interesting dice mechanic determines your offensive and defensive effectiveness, and playing Rimelands feels like an interactive board game where all of the dull pen-and-paper stuff has been automated for you.
An overhead map lets you travel to the towns and vaults that you discover during the game. Quests are obtained by talking with characters around the world much like your typical RPG. There is a main storyline to follow as well as many side quests to pick up and complete. The dungeons in Rimelands are full of dangerous enemies, as well as many unique treasures. Traversing these dungeons feels very Diablo-esque, as there are many rooms to explore and a ton of loot to obtain, although with strategic turn-based combat instead of the hack 'n slash variety. Making your way through the dungeons is incredibly fun, and I found it hard to stop playing until I was sure I'd explored every nook and cranny of each in order not to miss any lucrative treasure chests.
One of the high points of Rimelands is the extensive variety of items and weapons in the game, as well as the various skill trees for your character. Defeating enemies earns you gold and experience points, and upon leveling up you can choose a new ability from one of three skill trees. Barbarian brings melee effects, Assassin boosts your ranged abilities, and Shaman covers magical abilities. There's quite a bit of diversity with how you want to build your character, and good reason to play through the game multiple times focusing in different areas each time. An engineering dynamic is in the game as well, allowing you to build different weapons with blueprints that you find. It's an interesting idea, but not totally necessary due to the many excellent weapons you're bound to come across in the game anyway.
Graphically Rimelands is a beautiful game. The characters and enemies are fairly detailed, and their animations are excellent. The environments are also very attractive, with snowy terrain when you are in the above ground areas and dark dungeons with nice lighting effects when you go underground. The in-game graphics do have a slightly jagged look to them, but nothing overly detracting. Retina Display support is a possibility down the road, as is a native iPad version, although nothing has been finalized. Rimelands runs just fine in 2x mode on the iPad, and players in our forums are definitely enjoying the game this way. The story is told via static illustrations and text, and by in-game dialogue between characters as well. There isn't any full motion video or animated cutscenes, but the story is engaging and the illustrated bits look great.
There are plenty of other nuances to Rimelands, and it really is a game with a grand scope. You can expect to get about 8-10 hours out of one playthrough, and there is good incentive to go through multiple times and try out different character builds. Plus, this should only be the first chapter in the Rimelands universe, as more content will be coming down the line via updates as well as planned sequels. Dicework and Crescent Moon have a winner on their hands here, and I'll be looking forward to seeing more from this series. I don't typically love turn-based strategy games, but Rimelands had me hooked almost instantly. It's easy enough to get into whether you enjoy the strategic combat, loot collecting, character leveling, or just want to uncover the story in the unique steampunk universe. For fans of these elements, or any gamer in general, Rimelands: Hammer of Thor is a solid choice.
Puzzle Agent stars U.S. Department of Puzzle Research detective Nelson Tethers, who is tasked with solving a series of riddles surrounding the wintry town of Scoggins, Minnesaota.
Gameplay closely resembles Nintendo’s Professor Layton series for the Nintendo DS. Players will traverse a small series of environments, examining items and interviewing residents for clues. Along the way, Tethers will encounter self-contained logic puzzles that must be solved to progress the story.
Telltale’s previous App Store efforts have been strong, and if Puzzle Agent proves equally successful, future episodes could soon be on their way.
The multiplatform journey of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars continues with the announcement of an HD version for Apple’s iPad. It promises new and “updated” graphics, 50 missions, sidequests and the ability to play one’s own music for the soundtrack.
Chinatown Wars was GTA‘s first outing on Nintendo DS, and by all critics’ accounts, was remarkably successful even alongside the work of experienced DS developers. It received overwhelmingly positive reviews — but sold only 90,000 units in its debut month, shining a spotlight on whether Mature-rated content is viable on Nintendo’s handheld.
Although neither Rockstar nor publisher Take-Two has disclosed life-to-date sales for Chinatown Wars on DS, Take-Two CEO Ben Feder has said the company’s “very proud” of the game, and cited an achievement: it’s accounted for half of M-rated sales on the DS platform.
The company has been bringing Chinatown Wars to other platforms since; it launched a PSP edition that was widely-acclaimed (consumer site GameSpot called it ‘even better than the DS original‘) — but it failed to chart in the U.S. monthly NPD nor the UK top 40 charts within its release period.
When it released on iPhone in January of this year, it consistently made the App Store’s top 10 for numerous weeks following its release, and a free “Lite” version of the game regularly appeared among the top-downloaded free apps. The iPad version of the game arrives September 9, and will be priced at $9.99/£5.99.
Anticipation has been building on our forums for months now around Crescent Moon Games'Rimelands: Hammer of Thor [$4.99] since it was first announced. Due to an approval SNAFU, Rimelands took a little bit longer to be released than expected, but it just appeared for downloads mere moments ago.
In Rimelands, you follow the treasure hunter Rose Cristo through an epic steampunk fantasy adventure. The entire game is turn based, and features tons of customization options through talent trees and skill boosts. We're still working on our review which we will have posted soon, but if you've been chomping at the bit for Rimelands after following the threads in our upcoming games forum… It is finally here.
Games based on comic books have been almost as hit or miss as games based on movies in the past, so I think my cautious optimism for Gameloft's recently released Spider-Man: Total Mayhem [$6.99] was well deserved. Sure, there are some absolutely fantastic comic book games such as the quarter-sucking X-Men Arcade Game, and a few others over the years. Unfortunately, many fall in to the same pit that movie games fall in to where they lean far too heavily on whatever intellectual property the game is based on instead of actually having good gameplay. This is true to some extent in Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, but the whole package is comprehensive enough that it doesn't even seem to even matter.
Like all Gameloft games, many parts of Spider-Man are clearly borrowed from other titles of theirs, and Total Mayhem is no different. A lot of the combat feels like a mix of James Cameron's Avatar [$4.99 / Free / Free] and Iron Man 2 [$4.99 / Free / HD]. Spider-Man is host to the same wall climbing and rail sliding sections as nearly every other 3rd person action Gameloft game, and just like almost all of their other titles, the voice work is laughable at best and face palm worthy at worst. They even managed to sandwich the upgrade system from Hero of Sparta II [$6.99 / Free] in that nearly everything in the game drops orbs of various colors which are then used to upgrade Spider-Man's various abilities.
What saves the whole game is that even though they recycle all these different elements, they seem to combine extremely well to create a game that just feels like a Spider-Man game should. There are endless thugs for you to bash, a heavy reliance on the spider sense, and a surprising array of extremely recognizable bosses that anyone who has read a Spider-Man comic or watched a Spider-Man cartoon will know. The levels included are fairly linear, but feature a great mix of fighting standard enemies, bashing mini-bosses, swinging around, climbing, and the varied events leading up to the boss encounter.
The combat system works well, and even though it feels a little button mashy at times, it's a lot of fun to watch Spider-Man execute his combos filled with punching and web slinging. However, even fighting bosses is a little too easy because of how well the spider sense evasion system works. Whenever you're fighting, when there's an incoming attack you're able to slam your thumb down on a virtual button that appears just to the left of the joystick. A successful button mash kicks the game in to slow motion, and Spidey evades the incoming blow and counter-attacks. It all flows together great, and these spider sense moves usually look really cool.
There's a surprising amount of content in Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, including a hefty amount of unlockables to boost replay value. Twelve levels are included, and in each of the levels are tokens you can pick up to unlock bonus art to look at. In addition, there's an "ultimate" difficulty to unlock as well as a boss rush mode. There's even the black Spider-Man symbiote suit to unlock to play through the game again with Spidey powered up. Also, when fighting bosses you have opportunity to take photos of them, and these photo opportunities seem fairly easy to miss. If you're a completionist, you will be playing through Spider-Man: Total Mayhem many times.
Total Mayhem is loaded with high resolution graphics that look absolutely fantastic on the iPhone 4. It's not universal, but like most Gameloft games it wouldn't surprise me if an iPad-specific HD release was on the horizon. Gameloft did a great job of making a game that plays like a Spider-Man game needs to. The spider sense seems entirely overpowered in combat, and it won't take long for you to get tired of the spider sense quick action sequences that are liberally used in cut scenes, but beating up an endless array of nameless thugs is just as fun as it should be.
A little over a month ago I first posted my review of Godville [Free] and was entirely amused by the concept behind the game. In essence, Godville is barely a game at all, as your interaction with the world is limited to either encouraging or punishing your hero who otherwise just goes about his business. You play as your hero's god, and the "game" basically consists of you reading the events that transpire in your hero's life. Depending on how you treat your hero either through punishment or encouragement, your hero will either be a cold hearted bastard killing everything in its path or a happy go lucky lover of all things living… Or something in between.
Godville is a community driven game, and once your hero reaches level 10 you're able to participate in the idea box. You can submit ideas for items, equipment, quests, enemies, combat actions, and tons of other things. Users then vote on these entries, which are eventually implemented in the game. Initially, the adventures of your hero in Godville when the game first launched were fairly repetitive, but after a month of idea box submissions from users, the game has only grown more amazing.
Not only is Godville getting better from user submissions, but the developers have been hard at work releasing updates both to the Godville client itself, and the web-based backend that powers the whole game. Special artifacts are one of my new favorite inclusions. These are new items that your character will loot from monsters or win from duels that have special abilities. Of course your hero is entirely too stupid to operate said artifacts themselves, but you can spend your god power (otherwise used for punishing and encouraging) to have them operate the item. These items can teleport them back to town, put a gold brick in their inventory, strike a death from their records, and many other things.
The amusing part of all this is that if you don't catch that your hero has one of these special artifacts in their inventory, chances are they'll just give it away, sell it, or otherwise get swindled out of it before you even have a chance to use it. Even if you do use it and it has some marvelous effect, they'll usually just hawk it for beer money anyway. How little control you have over your hero is part of what makes Godville so much fun for me, as my hero almost never does what I want him to do, but seemingly has developed his own (fairly stupid but evil) personality of his own.
Previous to the recent update, your character would randomly find themselves in duels with the heroes of other players. Now, every few hours, you can send your hero off to an arena to immediately participate in these duels. Aside from potentially humiliating another god with defeat, winning a duel also awards you all the coins that the opponent is holding along with some other swag… This is often lost anyway as your hero's ego grows and he bites off more than he can chew in combat, then endlessly begs you to be resurrected.
I decided to post about this game again not only because it has had significant updates since our initial review, but also because I'm downright amazed that a game that isn't really even technically a game has held my attention for so long. Checking up on what my Godville dude is doing has somehow managed to slip in between checking my email and checking my Twitter feed on my phone. Admittedly, when I first tried the game I thought Godville had sky-high novelty value, but I didn't see it lasting for me as most novelty-heavy games are only amusing until said novelty runs out.
The buckets of creativity being dumped in to Godville seems to always make loading up the game amusing. Initially I only saw Godville as a clever jab at the grind of RPG's as instead of you spending your time grinding, your hero does it for you. After spending an immense amount of time with the game over the last month, Godville seems to be the most captivating virtual per experience I've had so far on the iPhone. If you haven't yet, you really need to give this game a try to see if it grows on you just as much as it has grown on me.
Knight’s Rush, the highly-anticipated title borne out of a promotional game, is now available from the app store. Developed by MoreGames Entertainment and published by Chillingo, Knight’s Rush expands upon A Quest for Knight’s Onrush’s side-scroller meant to promote the castle defense title Knight’s Onrush (you following me, camera guy?) by incorporating a 40-level campaign [...]
Back aboard the Gameloft party bus at E3 we got our first look at Ultimate Spider-Man Total Mayhem. When we saw it, the game played a lot like Gameloft's other third person action games, but totally drenched in all things Spider Man which any fan of the movies, comics, or cartoons will appreciate. The following trailer was released earlier today, which has a bit of gameplay footage towards the end:
Along with the trailer Gameloft also sent us a set of Retina Display resolution screenshots:
Spider Man is hitting the App Store September 1st, so if your spider sense is going crazy about that time, that may very well be why. In the meantime, swing by Gameloft's Ultimate Spider-Man Total Mayhem site which has quite a few details about the game including a listing of all the villains that you will come across.
Of the three factors that drew me to The Manhole, none of them turned out to work in the game’s favor. It’s an adventure game without any puzzles. It’s inspired by Alice in Wonderland. And, it’s made by Cyan Worlds, the studio which crafted Myst’s isolate, mysterious environment.
Considering these points a priori, The Manhole could be mistaken for an interactive fairy tale — a handcrafted pop-up book with buttons and patchworks sewn into its pages. I played it, then reconsidered. The Manhole is closer in definition to a nursery rhyme scribbled down on a cocktail napkin, with crumbs crumpled up in the corner, and maybe a food stain here or there.
I’m not referring to the nursery rhymes with wordplays that cheerfully disguise a hard fact of life, like Old Mother Hubbard, nor those that vaguely suggest something malicious, such as beheadings and acts of political intrigue, but just the melody of a nursery rhyme played from a mobile dangling over a crib.
Adaptations of Alice in Wonderland have always been weird. The upcoming sequel to American McGee’s Alice casts Alice as a rehabilitated mental patient on the verge of a relapse. In Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, creepy porcelain dolls and taxidermied rabbits — which hobble in arrhythmic stop-motion — reside down the Rabbit Hole. Even Disney’s Wonderland is awash in psychedelia.
The Manhole isn’t a literal, nor half-literal, interpretation of Lewis Carroll’s classic. Rand and Robyn Miller, the brothers who founded Cyan Worlds to make interactive children’s games for PC in the late eighties, took pieces of the story — a character here, a set piece there — and weaved them into their own uneventful yarn about animals… that stand around… and talk about stuff.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the oft-accompanied Through the Looking Glass, are books that fascinate children and adults alike. A child might be delighted by the pompous characterization of Humpty Dumpty, while adults are more likely to muse over his drunken logic when he says, “a word… means just what I choose it to mean.”
The Manhole appeals to neither, and would only hold the attention of a tyke who’s learning to move the cursor around the screen for the first time — a scenario that’s been removed from the equation after the game’s migration to touch screen.
Exploration carries the ominous feeling that you’re walking in circles. The white rabbit’s abode consists of a scant amount of rooms interconnected by ladders, tunnels, and halls leading to nowhere. The lackluster characters encountered between flights of stairs erupt in foolish harangues, the likes of which make Hey Diddle Diddle seem like Shakespeare, or Alice in Chains sound like Animal Collective.
The Manhole does itself no favors by alluding to an endearing children’s classic, which it only superficially resembles. Adding the word “Masterpiece” to the title doesn’t help matters either, and makes me question whether the game’s curators have taken Humpty Dumpty’s logic to heart.
In May of last year Cyan Worlds released an iPhone version of their groundbreaking (in its day) point and click adventure Myst [App Store]. Earlier this year we got word that Riven: The Sequel to Myst would be arriving on the iPhone by early summer. And, while it's obviously not here yet, we do have an update for those who've been waiting anxiously for Riven's arrival.
Early this month, Cyan's Mark DeForest (or 'Chogon') made a post on the Myst online forums indicating that they are expecting Riven to be available in early Fall, with Riven HD for the iPod following sometime after that. What's more, Cyan today launched a simple Riven for iOS website that reveals certain details about the forthcoming iPhone version along with a screenshot gallery.
The original Riven sights and sounds have been meticulously re-assembled for a remarkable experience on the iPhone and iPod touch. Everything that you remember from the original Riven in a format where a simple touch or swipe moves you through the world.
According to the website, the install of Riven for the iPhone is huge — and it's not surprising; Riven for the Mac and PC was initially distributed as a set of five CD-ROMs. Cyan has worked to optimize the original game data for the iOS platform but, even so, the game is about a gig and a half in size (probably the largest iOS application out there) and requires over 2 gigabytes of free storage for a successful install.
Riven for iPhone features, as listed by Cyan:
All the original Ages & gameplay
High quality images
Full music & sound effects
Movies & animations
Auto-save (when quitting or phone call)
"Bookmark" system to save & restore progress
Swipe to turn
Zoom in anywhere for more detail
“Hot Spot” hints
Works with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
We'll take a close look at Riven when it arrives and share our experiences with our readers. But, that's not the end of the Cyan news…
A small ad banner has recently appeared on the Cyan Worlds website that reads, "never let your timbers be shivered!" A click on the banner takes you to a rather spartan "preview" page that shows a screenshot of a new iOS game entitled Stoneship. Now, the savvy Myst fan will recall that "Stoneship" is the name of one of the ages in Myst, and this forthcoming title, which looks as if it may be some sort of top-down naval combat / tower defense / puzzle game, was surely inspired by it.
Unfortunately, that's about all the details we've got at the moment on this forthcoming, new title from Cyan. We'll share additional news on this one as we get it.
Tiger Style'sSpider is a game that we really just can't say enough good things about. The iPhone game, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [$2.99] was our game of the year in 2009, and Spider HD [$4.99] is great on the iPad. There's also the pseudo-lite version of the game, Spider: Hornet Smash [Free] which is totally worth checking out if you've yet to try Spider just to see how the mechanics of being a spider in the game work. We loved Spiderin our review, and the development of the game itself is also fairly interesting which was covered in both an interview and a talk at GDC Austin.
An update just hit the App Store for Spider that among other tweaks finally adds Retina Display support which has made the game look even more amazing. One of my favorite things about Spider always has been the great hand drawn art style that encompasses the whole game, and the high pixel density of the Retina Display now makes Spider even more visually impressive.
Spider has been out for just over a year now, so if you've had it chilling in your iTunes library instead of synced to your device, now is an excellent time to do so if you own an iPhone 4. Otherwise, if you're looking for another game to show off just how great things can look on the Retina Display, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor is a worthy pick.
The multiplatform journey of Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars continues with the announcement of an HD version for Apple’s iPad. It promises new and “updated” graphics, 50 missions, sidequests and the ability to play one’s own music for the soundtrack.
Games based on comic books have been almost as hit or miss as games based on movies in the past, so I think my cautious optimism for Gameloft's recently released Spider-Man: Total Mayhem [
A little over a month ago 
