Robot Dance Party

Do androids dream of an electric beat? 

In a deviation from the standard robot role in video games as murderous antagonist or cannon fodder, Robot Dance Party sees agitated androids hitting the dance floor to body pop and moonwalk the night away.

On opening the game for the first time, you create your own robot from a selection of parts before taking them out for a tutorial level. Before you know it, cogs and gears are flying all over the place as your mechanical creation starts shaking its pistons like there’s no tomorrow.

Your actual interaction with Robot Dance Party, apart from staring in bewilderment at a cyborg recreating Saturday Night Fever, is in tapping and sliding various onscreen prompts when they appear in time to music. Some prompts need to be held down, while others need to be tapped once or repeatedly, and so on.

As you go through the game’s meagre collection of songs, increasingly complex moves are introduced, with higher difficulty settings throwing more prompts at you to deal with. The cost of missing a step is a mistake from your robot and a reduction in your total score, but there’s no game over for cocking up a la Guitar Hero/Rockband.

At its best, Robot Dance Party is quite reminiscent of Elite Beat Agents, with the combination of catchy tapping in time to the music and the ludicrous display of mechanical manoeuvres going on in the background making it hard not to smile. The robotic dance animations are never going to match the moves of the real superimposed dancers in the Just Dance games, but they’re goofy enough to chuckle at.

Unfortunately, the game suffers from a woeful lack of staying power, not just because the songs are a truly awful mishmash of forced EDM sounds and robo-puns, but because of the way the game pads itself out. You have to keep repeating the same levels over and over to gain experience before unlocking more levels, by which time you’ll be so sick of a poorly autotuned woman drawling out binary code as backing vocals that it doesn’t seem worth the effort.

What’s more, customisation is made less enticing by the fact that only the robotic parts you are currently using level up, giving your score a boost and taking you one step towards escaping binary woman’s early work, before you can head onto her later stuff where she really started going downhill (or presumably she did, I didn’t actually get that far).

Robot Dance Party at least has the good sense to incorporate a multiplayer mode, and is probably silly enough on its own merits to warrant a free download, especially if the idea of a robot doing a Michael Jackson impression appeals. But after the novelty wears off and you’ve left the app alone for a bit, you probably won’t be saying “I’ll be back.” (That’s from Terminator. I’ll try harder next time.)

Robot Dance Party is out now on iOS and Android. Developer: DeNA Corp. 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. 

Crazy Taxi: City Rush

Crazy Taxi: City Rush isn’t quite Crazy Taxi as you know and love it, but is nonetheless still a madcap thrill ride.

It wouldn’t be overly cynical here to see City Rush as just another free-to-play cash in, this time on the much loved Crazy Taxi franchise. That said, unlike past titles by Hardlight, it’s actually still worth your while for a good deal of wacky, mindless fun to remind you of the good old days (if not reaching the same magnificent heights).

Having chosen a taxi and a character to helm it, the game sets you loose on a mission to collect fares from the bizarre inhabitants of Bay city, all of whom need to reach their destination quickly, no matter the cost to other people, cars, or the city in general. Gameplay mixes the vibe of the original Crazy Taxi titles with the endless auto runner. You swipe left or right to switch from lane to lane, hold down on either side of the screen to make turns, and tap to use boost and to brake sharply upon arrival.

Although it sounds a bit formulaic, in practice the elements actually combine together quite well. Swerving around to pick up coins, boosting through other traffic sending cars skywards, and lurching around corners while skater-punk rock blares in the background makes you feel about twelve again, but its the kind of cathartic feeling that you’ll keep coming back for. Even more so when bonus missions, including one that lets you drive around in a tank, are unlocked.

Off the streets, you’re given the chance to spend earned currency buying new taxis and crazy drivers, as well as customising your ride with a number of upgrades and aesthetic touches that give benefits in game. You’re also able to hire bonus drivers to increase your score for a brief period, as well as put your unused taxis on the road to gain you coins even when you aren’t driving them.

All in all, it’s a comprehensive Crazy Taxi package. However, this is of course a free-to-play game, and if there’s anything City Rush has in common with the 1999 arcade Crazy Taxi, it’s that it wants all of your loose change from the moment you start playing it. An energy system actually isn’t too bad, as often City Rush is best played in short bursts. But as soon as you notice the game has two separate currencies, and a load of features locked behind a paywall or a 24 hour wait time, you’ll realise that this game is about as dangerous to app addicts as a taxi with a maniac at the wheel.

Still, as long as you are capable of keeping your in-app-purchases to a sensible level (i.e. if you spend £70 on diamonds, forget crazy taxi – I’ll drive you to the looney bin myself) Crazy Taxi: City Rush is still fun to experience if only to jog your memory of those days whiled away on Dreamcast, dropping clinically insane people off at a bar milliseconds before the clock hits zero. Ah, better times.

Crazy Taxi City Rush is out now on iOS and Android. Website.

Hexiled

Hexiled is a spellbinding new wordplay app from creators Isaac Forman and Quentin Zervaas.

Playing Hexiled is a bit like trying to finish a crossword puzzle while the walls of the room you are sitting in close in around you Indiana Jones style. It’s a wordplay puzzler as educational as it is tense, and like most similar apps is perfect for looking smug and intelligent to anyone sitting on the bus seat behind you.

Taking place in the vast realms of space (for some reason), you are presented with a beehive-shaped assortment of letters, some of which go together to form words when the player drags across them. When this happens, the word found explodes, creating a new gap in the group that lets you interact with new letters.

So far, so Scrabble. However, in each of the three game modesin Hexiled, your goal is different; in “Escape” you must find enough words to move from the middle of the beehive to the outside against the clock. In “Survive”, you create words to stave off the countdown, with longer words adding more time, until eventually time runs out. Or, if you aren’t in the mood to be under pressure, “Explore” allows you to put words together from the letters at your leisure, in order to get the highest score possible.

Hexiled mixes things up by putting in a number of “hexabombs” that explode letters around them when integrated, as well as letters that can only be used in words of a certain length. As a result, it balances trickiness with a great sense of reward when you finally progress from forming the likes of “the” and “you” to “egregious” and “circumlocutory”.

Nevertheless, occasionally it can all dissolve into random guesswork, and even the most disciplined wordplay gamer is likely to start frustratedly dragging left right and centre to form that one disused (and probably native to a language you’ve never heard of) word that will allow you to progress.

Also, unless you are willing to fork out for premium, you will have to play a  certain number of escape levels before other modes are unlocked, which will likely irritate those who would prefer their dejumbling to take place without the cold eyes of a timer bearing down upon them.

That said, the premium app does have a number of cool statistics about the words you’ve used, and possibly Hexiled’s greatest asset is that you might learn a couple of words to impress colleagues at the water cooler from all the time glued to your phone.

All in all, Hexiled is the rare timewaster that you may actually find worthwhile, even if you’re the kind of person who watches Countdown for Rachel Riley rather than the anagrams.

Hexiled is out now on iOS. 

Blackwell: Legacy

With retro-style 2D graphics and tap-and-go gameplay, the first game in the Blackwell series is a gripping narrative experience that’s well suited to mobile devices.

The first three Blackwell adventure games landed on App Store last week, and to be honest I was a little apprehensive about playing them. With the exception of Telltale Game’s latest efforts, in which the difficulty is not in working out puzzles but in making grim moral decisions, the ambiguous strands of adventure game logic usually force me to have a walkthrough nearby, and even then I’ll probably stuff things up somehow.

In the end, the same was true of Blackwell: Legacy, and yet even if I’m rubbish at pointing and clicking it didn’t stop me from enjoying what was ultimately an engaging tale with a promising premise. If Legacy has taught me anything its that working something out for yourself is always more meaningful than if the answer is bold-facededly told to you. The solution is never the property of some tutorial pop-up window, but yours alone. Or, in my case, GameFAQs, but that’s beside the point.

If, like me, you haven’t played the original PC Blackwell games, think Ghost Whisperer combined with Monkey Island. For the most part, you play as Rosa Blackwell, a freelance writer who is consigned to write an article about the death of a local college student. However, things takes a mysterious turn when Joey, a ghost who’s been following Rosa’s now deceased relatives around for decades, appears to her looking for help in his most peculiar line of work; helping dead spirits still stuck on Earth to move on to the next realm.

A rather perplexed Rosa agrees, and things only get more bizarre from there. Thankfully, the story is kept from spinning off into nonsense by good writing and fully voiced characters, which is a pleasant, and immersive, surprise for an iOS title. The two leads work well off each other, with Rosa playing the sarcastic straight woman while Joey, who dresses and talks like a 1930s gangster, is a mix between wisecracker and  all-round enigma. At times, he seems as perplexed by what’s going on as Rosa, which makes both characters a relatable duo to solve mysteries with, even if you sometimes wish Joey’s ghostly powers extended slightly beyond causing a slight breeze or a radio to fizz.

Gameplay-wise, Legacy is classic Point-and-Click, with the focus usually on acquiring new clues and items from the environments by talking to people and occasionally manipulating objects. Often in order to progress, Rosa will need to combine clues she’s accumulated in her notebook, and it becomes a general rule of thumb that if there’s nothing new to interact with, reviewing what you’ve already collected is the best way to progress.

Arguably Blackwell‘s greatest draw is that it forces you to use lateral thinking to make the kind of connections other games would simply work out for you. There’s only a little hand-holding, and many of the characters involved in the case, including an apathetic  goth girl and a catatonic ghost who babbles nonsensical poetry, force you to think by being deliberately evasive. Old school gamers will love the challenge, if they aren’t already enamoured with the 90s art style, but newcomers will still likely stick around as a simple inventory system prevents the game from being too complex on a practical level, however hard the puzzles get.

This is a game that will frustrate those with a low tolerance for backtracking and, unless you are an adventure game ace, a fair deal of trial and error. However, for everyone else Blackwell’s first instalment really proves the strength of its genre on touch screens, whilst providing a spooky, out there narrative that you’ll want to see through to the end, even if you do need a walkthrough to get there. Thanks again, GameFaQs.

Blackwell Legacy is one of five Blackwell titles originally released on PC, and is out now on iOS.

Sonic Jump Fever

Sonic has had enough bad press without a free-to-play Doodle Jump clone sticking the boot in.

For many critics, Sonic games are only still going because nostalgia makes them commercially viable. Whether you believe this or not, it still seems odd that the hurrying hedgehog is only now being thrown onto the freemium bandwagon, a wagon already loaded with games that prey on our urge to unlock new characters and abilities using that most sacred of keys: Your wallet.

Even if you aren’t going to rag on Sonic Jump Fever for it’s barely concealed microtransactions, there’s still not much reason to recommend it. Its a haphazardly designed imitation of an idea that came out years ago, with attempts to add depth that only add clutter when they aren’t trying to get you to type in your Apple ID for payment.

If you’ve ever played Doodle Jump, ask yourself these questions: Did you think it would be improved by a limit on the number of gos you can have in one sitting? Did you ever wish that the enemies ruined game flow, or that there were upgrades that take ages to get unless you fork out for them? Sonic Jump Fever can’t hear your answers. It has closed its ears, while Tails holds out his hands for more of your money.

If you haven’t played Doodle Jump, then Sonic Jump Fever is still pretty unlikely to set your world alight. As in other auto-jump escapades, the goal remains to jump automatically upwards from platform to platform avoiding dangers and collecting pickups, with the difference here being that the cutesy Sonic set dressing has been heavily applied.

You’ll use sluggish tilt controls to move left and right as you progress, all the while probably imagining you aren’t playing a game that unnaturally shoehorns a much beloved childhood character into a format that he’s just not suited for.

Is it clear that I’m not a huge fan?

Let’s be honest. If there was ever a hero-to-zero in the games industry Sonic is it. But even seen as removed from the furball’s franchise (an abstraction process I imagine a lot of gamers carried out with Sonic 2006) Jump Fever offers nothing new and is scarcely worth the download, unless you want uninspired gameplay bolstered by free-to-play monetisation done wrong.

Sonic Jump Fever is out now on iOS and Android.

Timberman

The next great procrastin-app is not about flapping or cutting, but tree chopping.

Some games hook you in with a good storyline, or deep RPG elements, or fantastic visuals. Timberman is quite safe from having any of the above, and yet I have barely eaten or slept as a direct consequence of downloading it. It’s the next big cocaine fix of a video game showing, like Flappy Bird did, how one simple mechanic can soon come to dominate your existence.

In Timberman, your goal is to chop at an infinitely tall tree as much as possible before time runs out. If the burly onscreen lumberjack makes contact with any branches it’s game over, and so you must switch his position by tapping either side of the tree to move him over. Gamers who only enjoy complexity should look elsewhere. Civilization Revolution this is not.

Still, there’s a little bit of strategy going on while playing Timberman, and I’m not just talking about how you are supposed to reschedule your life and work around feeding your Timberman addiction. With every chop, the timer is restored slightly, although as you get better at avoiding branches and increase your score, the timer will decrease more quickly. Speed is of the essence, and learning the typical patterns of branches and a good tapping technique are vital for staying alive.

Graphically, Timberman will not win awards but you can’t help but see that’s the point. Its blocky backgrounds and marshmallow shaped protagonist, cutting what appear to be copy pasted oblong chunks from a tree, are not just charming but massively helpful. Say what you like about retro graphics, but without them Timberman (and a lot of 90s platformers) would likely be an imprecise, unplayable mess.

With a number of unlockable costumers for your stoic, axe-wielding hero, there’s a sense of humour to sustain you from playthrough to playthrough, if needed, and the obligatory option to tweet your latest scores,  a social media shoe-in I usually don’t like, will become well used when everyone in the world eventually deletes that idiotic bird from their iPhone and turns to the “dirk” side (technically a dirk is a dagger not an axe, but for pun’s sake imagine it’s not).

Generally, there are plenty of ways I could sum up Timberman, but I think the fact that I’ve had it open while I’ve been writing this review, which has taken me 9 hours, is pretty telling in itself.

Timberman is out now on iOS and Android.