PAKO – Car Chase Simulator

The chase is on.

PAKO – Car Chase Simulator isn’t out to realistically recreate police chases. I think I realised this when I was driving through a graveyard and the undead started attacking my car. Or maybe it was when I crashed into a house and watched the entire building explode into several papier-mache-like blocks.

It’s pretty obvious that PAKO is taking that increasingly common definition of “Simulator” meaning wacky, eccentric and unlike real life in any way at all. My favourite definition, in other words. After all, Papers Please never let you run away from a tank in a rickshaw moped.

The objective in PAKO is simply to stay alive as long as possible while some of the angriest police cars in gaming try to kill you. There’s no stopping and surrendering in this sim; From the viewpoint of a news helicopter surveying the scene from above, you’ll have to make sharp turns by holding down on either side of the screen, and narrowly pass obstacles and other civilian cars to avoid the boys in blue.

Just one hit on your vehicle will cause it to instantly explode into a fireball (again, not really a simulator) and so gameplay is all about quick decisions, tight drifting and a good amount of luck.

The game’s six environments place you in vastly different arenas for escaping the fuzz. Levels taking place in suburban settings and on a busy highway seem inspired by real chases, while the aforementioned zombie infested cemetery and a city stage in which tanks try to blow you up are probably inspired by some kind of acid trip.

 

Each level gives you a different a type of car to drive, from standard sports car, to limousine to the three-wheeler they drive in Only Fools and Horses. All handle very differently, but that’s about as deep as PAKO gets. The main strategy here is trying not to smash headlong into a lamppost, or get instantly T-boned by the brutal AI cops, who are comparable to the police in the original Driver when it comes to reckless lack of concern about their own safety.

PAKO’s origami paper visuals manage to look both bland and charmingly childlike at the same time, but this actually serves to make it more immersive. It’s not like a Burnout game, in which every crash is overly exaggerated in a long cutscene. It’s far more relaxing and smooth, which is probably why I became drawn in by it the same way I can never quite stop watching a run of bad sitcoms on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

In fairness, PAKO deserves far more respect than Two and a Half Men. The game is easy to start playing and quite rewarding once you’re good enough to stay alive for longer than 5 seconds without your car bursting into flames.

For the gamer who craves actual rewards and upgrades, PAKO won’t hold a lot of merit, but those who want an Ad-less, In-App Purchase-less, stupidity-laden bit of escapism should definitely chase this one up.

PAKO – Car Chase Simulator is out now on iOS and Windows Phone. Developer: Tree Men Games. Website

Spellfall

Spellfall is an engrossing way to match tiles, if you can handle the grind.

Tile Puzzle games have been all the rage on iOS, particularly since a certain confectionary crushing title by King came out. But it’s not really enough to just mimic Bejeweled or Candy Crush anymore. There’s got to be some variation on the norm, otherwise you’re just swapping out sweets and diamonds for some other arbitrary item to match with.

Fortunately, Spellfall from Backflip Studios is one such variation, meshing the Match-3 formula with that of the turn based RPG. There’s actual strategy in this tile swapping, and a unique sense of depth that make it something I feel much more validated in being addicted to then any game with the word “Saga” on the end.

Pitched in an arcane fantasy setting, you take the role of a powerful magician venturing across several realms, defeating monsters and building your strength by spending earned currency on new upgrades and equipment.

Enemy encounters place a tile board filled with various elements in the middle of the screen, and lining up three of the same element via dragging causes your character to cast a spell against whatever beast of burden lies in your path.

The tiles you align aren’t just for show. Enemy types are weaker against specific elements, losing more hitpoints when you they are matched. What’s more, unlockeable rune powers, such as the ability to heal yourself or poison your foe, are charged up every time you use their corresponding element. These extras add a good dose of strategy, as you are constantly being encouraged to use your limited number of moves in a single turn to gain the best possible outcome, rather than just casting random spells.

Rounding out the tile tactics are elements that knock out an entire column or row when triggered, random super tiles that deliver a different special move depending on the element, and big gold coins, the matching of which deals no damage to the enemy, but nets you more cash for upgrades back at camp.

It’s fair to say that Spellfall more than does enough to revitalise a done-before format, and appeal to the Candy Crushers and experience boosters in us alike. Its combat becomes more and more tense as the game progresses and the monsters you face bite, smack and bubble more and more precious HP away from your life bar. The game is well presented too, with cool looking supermoves and playfully animated enemies.

Sadly, Spellfall’s big drawback is noticeable after you’ve been playing it for about … fifteen minutes. In bringing the advantages of an RPG system, the game can’t quite escape bringing one major pitfall: it’s pretty grindy, and as free to play nowadays basically means “paying to get rid of grinding”, SpellFall isn’t about to make steps to alleviate the problem. Quite opposingly, it embraces it with open arms.

Most egregious is the system for simply healing your character  You’ll need to play quite a bit to accumulate enough money for stronger items, and this means a lot of battles, but healing your character to full health requires either a healthy sum of coins or a wait time. Unless you are willing to pay 69p every time you die, your time with SpellFall will have to be reduced to short stints, in which you’ll have to save up as much as possible before inevitably being eaten by a monster.

When you consider all the factors, it feels quite sad to have to lump Spellfall in with the rest of the games that hinder strong ideas with monetisation. But in this instance, I’m giving it a pass. The gameplay and graphics were good enough to prevent me ever getting too grumpy about having to go and do something more productive with my life every 20 minutes.

As long as you aren’t going to blow your life savings on revives and fancy costumes for your character, Spellfall is an engaging new spin on old ideas. Irritating really, as I had a great pun for the opposing view (“Spell-fall”? More like, “Aw-fall”. Yeah, I’m sorry, I’ll leave now).

Spellfall is out now on iOS. Website

Touch Racing 2

Despite its rather generic design, Touch Racing 2 will give you some more amusing racing to pass the hours until death.

There’s been an established format for racers on iOS for quite some time, and Touch Racing 2 from Marvelous Games never really breaks from the mould. It’s got a map full of slightly different missions that can be completed in any order. It’s got lots of recognisable upgrades and customisation options. It’s got an energy meter, and even a cast of kooky characters who give you tips and tell you regularly and sternly where the In-App-Purchases can be found.

In simpler terms, Touch Racing 2 is your bread and butter free-to-play iOS racer, and there’s a very clear reason why. After all, this kind of design is made to keep you hooked on gameplay that might otherwise seem a little repetitive with a constant stream of rewards, bonuses, trinkets and treasures.

But cynicism should always be trounced by how much fun you are having, and, to be completely fair, Touch Racing 2 is quite fun. It reminds me a lot of Micro Machines, a PC game I used to play when I was younger, and which I never expected to be comparing to a game played on a magical touchscreen tablet. Nostalgia card, well played.

Taking an overhead view, races in Touch Racing 2 occur across four tiers of small model-sized circuits that usually require only a couple of short, dash-to-the-finish laps to complete, making the game more Fast and Furious than Formula 1.

You’ll use boats, cars and off road cars, but while the difference in terrain does create some variation, they’re all controlled in the same way; by holding a thumb down in the direction you want your vehicle to go, or by using a standard onscreen steering wheel. There’s even an option to use an exterior gamepad, if you are techy enough to get it to work (side note: I’m definitely not).

Out of the control schemes for us touchpad ludites, your best option is the thumb system as the steering wheel reflects other onscreen buttons in that it will fail you at the worst of times. Simply pointing to where you want to go can feel a bit challenge-less, but switching hands to negotiate perfect drifts through turns is pretty exhilarating when you get it right, even if it makes holding the iPad upright an unachievable pipe dream.

The game’s lively atmosphere isn’t exactly matched by its visuals which, barring a few neat touches here and there, rarely venture beyond adequate. The entourage of cartoon boss characters you’ll face off against are particularly bland, and serve little more as context fillers with “wacky” dialogue that you’ll mostly skip without even reading. Fortunately, the game isn’t as much about them as it is about swerving round corners at just the right angle, careering quite illegally into other poor CPU cars, and shooting forward off a boostpad while you imagine your little driver flipping the bird out the back.

On reflection, perhaps i should be spending more time condemning Touch Racing 2 for being a cookie cutter racer with only one real hook in the form of its touch-based control style. Maybe it is just another example to add to the increasing list of F2p monetisation games gone exploitative with a design that preys on the reliable impatience of gamers.

On the other hand, it’s quite fun and its free to download. Simple as that, really. Plonk your children in front of it when you feel like peace and quiet and this is one app that will do the trick. Keep your credit card away from them though, for God’s sake.

Touch Racing 2 is out now on iOS and Android. 

App Addicts Anonymous!

Welcome to the first of this triple-A segment covering the most addictive iOS games out now on the App Store!

Here, I’ll be focusing on recent apps with gameplay mechanics so simple to the point that they barely need a tutorial, and yet are capable of gluing you to your phone no matter what other important activities desperately require your attention. So, without further ado, here is the list for August!

Color Stairs

Color Stairs may only give you a bunch of coloured blocks and the basic task of jumping between them, but its bright visuals and drag-and-release play style make it easy to pick up and hard to put back down again. Yeah, it’s not the deepest game (there are puddles the size of one raindrop that are probably deeper), but for a free app, it’s quite addictive. Thus, it is in the list.

Impulse

Operating on even less screen space than Color Stairs, Impulse is outright deceptive in its simplicity. This is a game that will test your patience to the tune of Flappy Bird, combining the difficult jumping of that game with the visuals of Falldown in reverse. It can be a nightmare trying to navigate your way up without slamming head first into the next floor or careering out of bounds, but well worth the bragging rights when you get good at it. If you can beat my staggering high score of 8, I’ll be impressed.

Timberman/Grumpy Gorilla

It’s a tie really between these two games, both of which play in exactly the same way but hey; it’s nice to look at a different creature bashing blocks from a tall oblong structure every now and again. Both operate on a unique approach to tapping based obstacle avoidal that’s got a great flow to it. Plus, however much you hate clashing into a tree branch or outward jutting bit of scaffolding, you can never really say it was the game’s fault, which only drives you to chop trees or bash buildings for another 8 hours.

99 challenges!

Another mix of frustration and fun, 99 Challenges! starts you off slow but quickly begins to show you why it’s called 99 Challenges! and not 99 Straitforward, Easy To Complete Levels. As you descend down a hellish tower of increasingly vicious platforming puzzles you may well end up screaming in anger, but the fact that the game has a tangible end point unlike so many endless iOS games only increases the amount of time you’ll spend trying to beat it. Usually with This-Shit-Will-Not-Beat-Me levels of determination.

Rotate – A Rotating World

A full review of Rotate can be found here, but the gist is that you are attempting to negotiate jumps across circular platforms that want nothing more than to spin your little yellow cube off into an untimely death. With a heavy emphasis on timing and speediness, this isn’t a game for the slow, calculating iOS gamer, but as most of the games on this list require you to do things quickly, you may we’ll have guessed that by now. Also, is it just me or do the circles remind you of the generic spinning wheels you see in loading screens for various console games? I think that’s charming. Don’t know why.

All games out now for free on the App Store.

Which iOS games are you addicted to at the moment? Tweet @Evaluapp!

One tap RPG – Pachinko-like Dungeon Crawler

One Tap RPG – Pachinko-like Dungeon Crawler takes passive gameplay to new levels of uninteresting.

Given my rather poor knowledge of Japanese culture for someone who likes video games, the word “pachinko” was a complete mystery to me. Turns out it’s a pinball game played in Tokyo by droves of people all sitting in an arcade, although if it’s anything like as dull as One Tap RPG I cannot fathom why they wouldn’t just play Crazy Taxi or something instead.

Rather strangely the game being called “One Tap RPG” is misleading and true to the experience all at once. I thought it was going to be an innovative new form of role playing game, one that condenses the typical RPG mechanics of swords, sorcery and stat-building down into a single tap.

And I was right, you do only have to tap once in One Tap RPG. Right at the start of the level. And then you do absolutely nothing else.

Well, I suppose that’s not entirely true. You get to sit there and observe a little man in a knight costume meandering slowly down the screen, bouncing off obstacles until he either makes it to the end or drops down dead while you helplessly watch. Oh yes, and you also level up occasionally, although I’ve got no idea why.

There is but one strand of strategy, and that’s deciding where to place your knight at the beginning of each randomised level. From there he’ll walk blindly onwards, bumping into barrels and off enemies, losing health without a care in the world. Occasionally, he’ll gain new item or power, such as a shield of fireballs that temporarily bolsters his defence, but your progress and final score is entirely based on luck as there’s no way of controlling his direction, speed or attacks.

Is this what counts for a game nowadays? It certainly looks like one. It’s got retro graphics, it’s got undead skeletons walking around, its got power-ups. It’s even got a main menu, for God’s sake. But a Dungeon Crawler it is not. It’s a 2D physics engine one tap away from having no interactability whatsoever.

I’m all for games which can sum up their entire mechanic with just three words, but usually when I download something to pass the time I want it to be slightly more of an exciting challenge than if I had just chosen to look out the window, or pay the water bill.

Maybe there is something here for the more passive gamer. Or maybe just someone who’s terrified of being given any responsibility. Or maybe someone who’s chronically lazy to the point they’d rather spend 69p on a game with no gameplay than on the countless fun, original free-to-play apps.

The game’s nostalgic vibe only adds to the frustration. You can’t help but notice that there is stuff here that could work really well if you just had some control over what was happening. Maybe even a dodge move, or the ability to cast spells at certain points. Oh, sorry then it wouldn’t be One Tap RPG, would it? My mistake.

Fair play to Pachinko itself, which seems to be all the rage in the Japan. In the case of One Tap RPG, the most you’ll get from it is when you delete it from your iPhone, freeing up memory you can use for games that actually involve the player instead of treating them like an ignition key.

One Tap RPG – Pachinko-like Dungeon Crawler is out now on iOS.

Rotate – A Rotating World

ROTATE – A Rotating World is a fiendishly difficult platformer you’ll find yourself circling back to play again and again .

Your aim in ROTATE – A Rotating World is to jump a small yellow square from platform to platform, avoiding spinning wheels of death and trying not to spring accidentally out of bounds.

It might sound tried and true, but ROTATE has one key difference. The platforms you’re traversing aren’t flat, but circular surfaces that are constantly rotating at different speeds. You’ll have to wait until your square spins round to the right position before tapping to send it safely on to the next section.

What’s more, as soon as you occupy a platform it will start to disappear, meaning you’ll only have a couple of rotations to launch safely to another destination before the game is up.

Some platformers present each of their levels as complex puzzles, asking you to carefully piece out your route from area to area, while others rely more on expert timing, challenging you to hit the sweet spot or be sent straight to a game over screen.

ROTATE combines the two above in an endless journey upwards, resulting in a daunting level of difficulty, but once you start getting the hang of it you’ll be beaming from point to point, snatching pickups that add to your score and planning and executing your next move in the nick of time.

It’s only really when you get good enough at circumnavigating the circles that the game hits Rayman Jungle Run levels of flow, and by this point you’ll have seen all ROTATE has to offer. But after a few turns you’ll likely find it impossible to turn off thanks to the strength of its core mechanic, which prevents the game from needing a whole bunch of other tricks up its sleeve.

ROTATE may appeal more to the masochistic puzzler than the causal enjoyer of iOS Sudokus. Still, if you are looking for a new platformer requiring practise, skill and an extremely dizzy yellow square for a protagonist, you should definitely give it a spin.

Rotate – A Rotating World is out now on iOS.

Tank Biathlon

A bland, unforgiving and unenjoyable experience that’s outgunned by countless other simulator apps.

Tank Biathlon does the unthinkable by somehow making tanks boring. Taking its cues from a popular Russian sport doesn’t save it from being essentially a bunch of repetitive minigames that might appeal to tank loving masochists, but is utterly uninspiring to anyone else.

Instead of dropping you into a war zone, Tank Biathlon keeps its “action” grounded in a small arena of tank-based challenges that you’ll take on one after another in a sequence. Everything is tested, from your control of the tank at specific speeds, to your skill at shooting at bits of cardboard, to your ability to not go back to app store and find something  better to play.

To the game’s credit, the work put into detailing a realistic looking tank on iOS is commendable, and the sharp models and explosion effects are quite nice to look at. The Unreal Engine once again works its magic touch, and once again it makes another game looks its best on iPad and chug to near unplayable levels on earlier iPhones.

The trouble is that most of your time won’t be spent marvelling at visuals, but cursing clumsy controls that are nowhere near precise enough for the task. There are two systems for moving, one relying on you pushing two throttles (one for each side of the tanks wheels) and the other using one throttle for speed and a stick for turning. Both are terrible, and make it difficult to avoid pillars that give you massive time penalties, even when you are driving in a straight line.

You’ll crave a controller, if you haven’t already given up by the shooting segments. A heavy tutorial system makes everything clear except why none of your shots hit the target no matter where you aim, although if you are still struggling on iPhone the bulk of your thumb dragging the gun will usually prevent you from knowing where you are aiming anyway.

But worst, worst, worst of all is the commentator. Oh, God. Never has a voiceover man made me want to fire a shell into his mouth more than this. Not only does he never shut up, constantly blabbing about how wonderful tanks are and thanking the organisers of this crappy fictional competition, but he also shows a ridiculously irritating level of glee in your failure. “Terrible, just terrible” he’ll tut, as if actually playing the game isn’t punishment enough.

In short, the strength of your patience for Tank Biathlon will really depend on how much you enjoy faffing around in a unwieldy tank while an inane idiot commentates over it. Much more enjoyable faffing can be found in World Of Tanks Blitz, a game which completely blows this one out of the water.

Tank Biathlon is out now on iOS.

80 Days

A beautifully written adventure game based on Jules Verne’s famous novel, 80 Days imbues a worldwide journey with character, wit and wonderful animation.

From inkle, the creators of Sorcery! comes 80 Days, a choose-your-own adventure title that’s quite unlike anything else on the App Store.

80 Days places you in the shoes of Jean Passepartout, a humble French valet who’s hooked into travelling the globe when his master, Englishman Phileas Fogg, makes an astonishing wager for someone from the 19th Century.

Your challenge is to plan and complete a route around the world’s major cities in 80 days or less, accounting for a number of issues including money, travel time, Fogg’s wellbeing and a number of distractions picked up along the way.

In each new city, you can spend your time perusing the marketplace, waiting to retrieve money from the local bank, planning your next escapade or exploring the area to add potential transport avenues to your map. All the while, Passepartout records the trials and tribulations of the trip in interactive diary entries that pop up onscreen at random times.

While Fogg’s focus on his mission leaves him distant and evasive, you’ll grow far more attached to Passepartout as he meets the planet’s more eccentric characters and regularly lands himself in trouble. Enthusiastic, occasionally sarcastic but always loyal to his master, he is the perfect shoulder for the player to sit on during the voyage, making the game’s fish-out-of-water moments both humorous and insightful in equal measure.

Nonetheless, the crux of the game is that you are constantly playing a part in the story’s direction. Not only do you call the shots when it comes to your next destination, but each interactive paragraph presented to you leaves its last sentence unfinished, allowing you to choose how it ends from a set of options. Often you’ll feel seemingly small choices altering the course of events entirely, which can wind up working in your favour some of the time and in a good telling off from Fogg in others.

Together with the vivid description of Passepartout’s journal, the game’s artful presentation, with its depiction of famous landmarks and background noise of trade and bustling streets, really helps your imagination run wild.

It bears mentioning that 80 Days is very much an app for readers, particularly those enamoured with the source material. Gamers who like their action to move slightly more quickly than a Zeppelin or old-fashioned motorcar will eventually tire of the game’s repetitive travelling, planning and occasionally lengthy missives from Passepartout.

However, if you’re in the right mood to take a pleasant stroll across the Earth from the comfort of your mobile, 80 Days is fantastic. Its soundtrack, writing and art style combine to transport you from your iPhone screen to whatever new peril Fogg and his manservant have become embroiled in this time. And with a myriad of choices providing almost limitless replayability, this is one trip that’s definitely well worth the ticket price.

80 Days is out now on iOS. Website

Epic Skater

Fans of Tony Hawk and big combo building will never be board again with Epic Skater.

The timing-based trickery of Olli Olli is merged with Joe Danger-style graphics in this engrossing skateboarding app from some capable creators at Kongregate.

Epic Skater might look like it’s just for kids, with collectible coins the size of car tyres and an Ash Ketchum lookalike riding the board. However, it’s just as likely to hook adults with insane combos and grinds that might remind you of a certain Pro Skater game of the 1990s.

Taking place on a 2D plane, you’ll control your skater as he gains big air, does tricks and tries as hard as possible not to stack it.  Holding down on the touch screen and releasing performs an ollie, from which you can attempt a variety of tricks by swiping in any direction.

Grinding is as simple as ollying onto a rail, swiping to tweak your grind and (hopefully) landing, with maybe a kick flip or two thrown in for good measure. Accumulated score and collected gold nets you upgrades to improve your skater’s abilities, and make it easier to complete sets of game challenges that grow in difficulty as they are completed. You’ll also level up to add manuals and spins to your already well stocked combo arsenal.

Epic Skater flows exceptionally well from trick to trick, nailing just the right level of challenge to be rewarding while keeping the game moving at a fast pace. It’s not surprising to learn that some of the game’s creators are actually from Neversoft, the developers of the original Tony Hawk games, as landing massive combos of score-boosting tricks gives the same high level of satisfaction.

The graphical style embraces a colourful cartoonish version of Los Angeles lacking in the general griminess usually present in this genre, but hey: Nobody really wants the realism of Skate on a mobile platform, do they?

Nonetheless, I like to imagine the game sticking up a skater’s middle finger to the corporate world with its pleasant lack of advertising for a free iOS game. What’s more, in-app purchases stretch mainly to energy drinks that revive the skater after a failed trick, but are easy to bypass completely, keeping the need for skill and timing intact.

Whether you are a real-life skater pro, or just think skateboarding an extremely ineffective mode of transport, Epic Skater is sure to kickflip its way into your heart. Notice I used “kick flip” instead of “grind” there, that could have been awkward.

Epic Skater is out now on iOS and Android. Website

Fish & Shark

A good-looking but monotonous auto-runner with one niggling flaw. 

We’ve found it, everyone. We’ve found what is officially the most irritating “Game Over” noise ever put in a video game. Worse than the Flappy Bird smack, or even that stupid dog in Duck Hunt having a good old giggle.

Is it possible to not recommend a game based purely on one sound effect? It might seem a bit harsh, as aside from that Fish & Shark is a stunningly beautiful, if slightly dull auto-runner about jumping over obstacles.

It’s hardly offensive. It’s even got quite a nice soundtrack to listen to while your cube-shaped fish or shark swims merrily along, bounding over islands and splashing back into the water spraying little droplets all over the place.

The problem is that when your fish fails to make a jump, you are forced to prepare for a high pitched, hellish yelp that sounds like the kind of noise Mickey Mouse makes while watching Minnie being disembowelled.

Maybe I’m being a little overboard on this, but why make a game this serene and relaxing, only to punctuate it with a noise so phone-crushingly excruciating that it will make you want to feed its creator to Jaws?

Fish & Shark’s visuals are its only real saving grace

It’s a real bummer, because enough can’t be said about the game’s exotic visuals; a colourful collection of cubed objects reminiscent of Minecraft, with sharp dimensions that pop and shine magnificently on both iPad and iPhone.

As an actual game, it’s not awful either, as long as you have a stomach for practise-makes-perfect levels of difficulty. Your creature will jump for as long as you hold down on the touch screen, and score is increased by collecting various floating flower shaped objects as you go. The game is really a test of trial-and-error patience, as it’s impossible to know how high the next obstacle will be until you’ve passed it by blind luck or fish-planted straight into a sandstone wall.

Accompanied by one of the worst sounds in gaming.

In short, Fish & Shark tries to make up for unoriginal gameplay by being nearly as hard as The Impossible Game, meaning you’ll spend more time misjudging jumps than landing them, even on the easier Fish mode. The difference is that The Impossible Game never added to the frustration with a nightmarish mini-shriek that will haunt your dreams for days to come.

Okay, so it’s not that bad. But in all seriousness, putting your phone on silent is probably the only way to make Fish & Shark tolerable, and “tolerable”, although it might be enough for a free download, is not the kind of word you use to describe the next killer app, even if it does have one of the cutest sharks in gaming.

To sum up this rather one-note rant, Fish & Shark is better seen and not heard, like a child in the 1940s or Cheryl Cole. But it’s still not that inviting, and likely to sink pretty quickly down the App Store chart.

Metal Gear Solid, now there’s a Game Over for you.

Fish and Shark is out now on iOS.