Free To Play
King’s Bounty: Legions – Turn Based Combat Perfected
King’s Bounty: Legions comes with a lot of history, and almost lives up to it. The original game was released back in dawn of time circa 1990, and laid down a lot of the ground rules for what would evolve in to the long running Heroes of Might and Magic, a series which has eclipsed it’s predecessor. A Russian publisher, 1C brought back the franchise eighteen years later, with the excellent PC game King’s Bounty: Legend and it’s direct sequel, Armored Princess.
I played both of those compulsively for weeks, so when I saw that there was King’s Bounty game available on android I jumped at the chance to to return once more to the world of Endoria and see if it was possible to recapture some of that turn based strategy magic.
Blitz Brigade – Locked and Loaded Multiplayer FPS Action
Gameloft is no stranger to First-Person Shooter (FPS) games. I’m sure you are familiar with Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance (N.O.V.A.) 3 and Modern Combat series. This time, you have to choose sides, either Axis or Allied forces, in their new Android game, Blitz Brigade, an ultimate multiplayer FPS face-off that seems to pay homage to Team Fortress.
Before diving in the action immediately, it is best advised to work on your skills in Training Missions. It has 120 action-packed missions which allow you to master different skills. You could also navigate a helicopter and fire off enemies on the ground. Further, you could even control a tank and flatten your opponents.
Quick Review: Angry Birds Friends – Who Needs Friends When You’ve Got Aviaries?
It’s not enough for Angry Birds to keep people glued to their phones and tablets anymore; the folks at Rovio decided it’s time they went social. With Angry Birds Friends, the idea is that it’s no longer a solo experience, but one to be enjoyed competitively online. You can either hop on Facebook and play in browser or download the free app and hook into the social network there. Either way, it’s basically the same old game, but not quite.
What they’re to do with Angry Birds model here is interesting. The mobile space hasn’t yet had a competitive game with an insane number of players the way consoles have Call of Duty and PC has League of Legends. If anyone is in a position to try and go for that golden goose, it’s Rovio, but I don’t think Angry Birds Friends pulls it off. As a free-to-play title, this iteration has Facebookers flinging birds, competing in tournaments, and buying power-ups along the way, hopefully. While you’ve still got a variety of birds on the left side of the screen headed for a flimsy structure on the right, the aim assist that shows where you’re bird is going has disappeared.
Perfect Kick: It Shoots, It Scores
I’m not really a sports fan, and football (sorry, soccer, pardon my Britishness) comes at the bottom of a very short list of my favourites. But there was something about this game that intrigued me. Perfect Kick focuses on the penalty shootout, a part of the game that causes endless controversy and upset in real life, but when distilled in to a simple little videogame works very well.
Quick Review: Boggle – Accurate to the Real Life Game, Driving Me Insane!
Boggle was always one of those games I played growing up that drove me nuts. Unlike Scrabble, where a player has quite a while to conceive words out of the letters in front of them, you’re staring at a cluster fudge of letters, completely unarrangable by your hand, and a evil maniacal timer judges you, making you feel dumb for not noticing the most obvious of words. This aneurysm enduing but beloved game from my childhood has made its way onto Android devices thanks to the efforts of the folks at EA.
Homerun Battle 3D – Going, Going, and Caught at the Warning Track
A couple of months ago, I reviewed Com2US’s 9 Innings: Pro Baseball 2013. I lamented on how this game was a great concept in the making, but fell just a few feet short, kind of like every time Joe Mauer tries to hit a homerun, but usually hits into a ground ball double play. In an attempt to give Com2US another chance with America’s former pastime, I downloaded an older title of theirs, Homerun Battle 3D. The idea behind this title is pretty self explanatory; rather than being an entire baseball game, this title is just the beloved at of smashing a baseball to absurd distances. The only good part of MLB All Star Weekend if you ask me.
Quick Review: Flick Golf Free – Drives Short, Misses the Pin
Full Fat released the new and improved free to play version of their smashing hit, Flick Golf. This Android game has the same tagline of “Golf. Reinvented.” Unfortunately, I believe it’s a little half-baked. The proclamation of having reinvented golf when you just have to drive the ball close to the hole is not reinvention, IMHO.
Anyway, Flick Golf Free is an under par golf game that features incredibly responsive controls. Aside from not having to select clubs or worry which type of shot you should play, there is no more typical swing meter or power bar as you just have to swipe to drive the ball. You also have the ability to add spin on the ball up to its third bounce just by simply swiping to your preferred direction. It is undeniably creative and adds a nice touch. Though this Android game includes pins, greens, flags, bunkers, water, sands, clubs and balls, it does not present a total golf experience. Each hole has a par of one and you score points when you hit the ball inside a radius within the pin. Sink a hole-in-one and you get bonus points and additional time.
Quick Review: Daddy Was a Thief – Big Daddy Robs Banks Then Your Time
After being fired from work, Daddy planned to rob a bank to provide for his family. Help him navigate down the building to escape by smashing various obstacles like floors, walls, TVs, refrigerators, washing machine and other furniture. This Android game is an arcade, high-score chaser that you could just pick-up-and-play with tons of achievements to earn. Your goal is to gain as much coins as you can without getting caught as the police are just waiting below. Some has baton while certain forces have guns. Look out for the old lady, bullet-firing turret which turns you to the size of your baby and the missiles darting from either side. If the missile hit you, the game is over as well.
Quick Review: Fighting Tiger Liberal – Proof Google Could Stand To Use a Review Process
I was commenting with a colleague the other day about the lack of fighting games on the Google Play store. I spent some time perusing the various titles that came up under that search parameter; Fighting Tiger – Liberal being one of them. This game isn’t a fighter per se in the sense of your Mortal Kombat or Tekken, this is more of a 3D version of Streets of Rage or your traditional brawler. That confused me a bit that it would come up under fighters, but what the heck, why not give it a whirl, I thought.
Quick Review: Blendoku – A Double Rainbow in Puzzle Form
Every now and then a game comes along that strikes you as being so simple that it couldn’t possibly work. Putting squares of color in order of shade–for example going from red to violet, through pink and purple– just doesn’t seem like a good basis on which to build a puzzle game. In fact it seem insultingly childish. But somehow Blendoku pulls it off.
No doubt inspired by those charts you get at hardware stores in the paint aisle, which have every possible color graduation and are intended to help you pick out just the right shade for your bedroom walls, but instead get you helplessly confused and overwhelmed by the sheer variety on display, Blendoku lulls you in to a false sense of security during its early levels leading you to think that this can’t possibly as fiendishly taxing as it turns out to be. All you have to do is complete a sequence of colors by dragging the correct one from the jumbled selection at the top of the screen to the placeholders at the bottom. The subtle differences in hue across each colored piece will be familiar to anyone that uses any kind of photo editing software, as the player is essentially tasked to recreate the paint function’s color selection sub menu. It’s an odd task, but soon you’ll accept this new variant on the sudoku formula, in fact arranging the colors becomes as instinctive as the number sequences in that classic puzzle.
