by ·Comments Off on Zombies, Run! An excellent way to keep fit and look paranoid

Zombies Run!As far as motivations to run go, being chased by zombies is a very compelling one.

Zombies, Run! is an app that blends fitness tracking with some light gamification to create a more interesting way of staying in shape. Pitching you into a standard zombie apocalypse scenario through audio snippets piped into your headphones, the game feeds you instructions and updates whilst your phone keeps track of how far you have run and how quickly you are running.

The gamification elements come from supplies that you ‘find’ whilst out for your run. Once you’re back at home and collapsing on the sofa in a sweaty mess, you can spend these resources to build up your virtual survivor town with new buildings to help other inhabitants of your post apocalyptic world.

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by ·Comments Off on One More Line: The lonely smoker’s perfect game

One More Line logoOne More Line might very well be the best cigarette break game on the market right now.

Taking on a neon art-deco Atari-esque aesthetic, One More Line gives you a small dome-shape to control and sets you the task of travelling as far as you can without crashing into discs strewn in your path or the walls to either side of you.

The reason that this makes for such an excellent cigarette-break game lies in its extraordinarily simple controls. Easily controlled one-handed, pressing your thumb onto the screen locks your little ship (we’ll call it a ship for lack of a better word) on to a nearby disc and spins you in an arc around it. Releasing your thumb makes your ship let go and beetle off in the direction it is now facing, mostly like directly into the path of a wall or another disc.

One More Line is surprisingly difficult to master. A single run takes a matter of seconds and how long you play will probably depend on how long you’ve got. There is admittedly a bit of a compulsion to keep playing when you first pick the game up, but once you’ve got used to it it’s very easy to put down again and get on with your life.

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by ·Comments Off on iOS Game Review: Niko

iOS Game Review:  Niko

Niko is a platformer from Habbo Hotel creators, Sulake.  It is worthy of comment for two reasons:  Firstly, it has some level of integration with Habbo Hotel, a hugely successful and popular virtual world that has been one of the innovators of micro transactions and secondly, it resolves a lot of problems that platform games have on a touch screen device.

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by ·Comments Off on iPad/iPhone Game: Squids

Title: Squids

Developer/Publisher: The Game Bakers

Price: 69p

The phrase ‘Turn based RPG’ can send a shiver down the spines of many gamers.  Some hate them for the predominant use of clunky menu systems, a relic from a bygone age that has somehow survived into the modern era of gaming, some dread how compelling they can be and have fevered nightmares of the amount of time they have sunk into them, and some love them so much that they have become frustrated that it’s a relatively under-served genre.

Whatever you think of them, the turn based RPGs of this world can display an awful lot of depth and complexity and the right one can compel even those not traditionally fans of the genre to sink many hours in to them.

Enter Squids.

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by ·Comments Off on iPad/iPhone Game: Dream Track Nation

Uncomplicated mechanics and controls seem to be essential in iPhone and iPad games due to the limitations of the interface.  Games that forget they are being played through a touch screen and try to overcomplicate their gameplay with elements that would be happier in a PC or console environment can render themselves unplayable.  With this in mind, when something comes along that has a simple control interface, it is not only a pleasure to play but more importantly, something that you are happy to keep going back to.

Today I’m looking at Dream Track Nation which is one of these titles that is effective in its simplicity.

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