Turret wars is an action-strategy game from ClickGamer and Sector3.

Having grown up playing a whole lot of Worms games I’m extremely familiar with the turn-based action-strategy genre.  Those games felt great while they were kept in their 2D confines, but as soon as the series made the jump into the third dimension things began to fall apart.  Having that extra direction to worry about in a game that requires such precise aiming presents a whole new set of challenges and problems.  Turret Wars looks to adopt and simplify this same concept, but ends up falling flat.

The A.I. opponents really want you dead

You’ll take control of a stationary turret placed randomly on the map with enemy turrets equally scattered around.  From here you survey the map, find an enemy you want to destroy, take aim, fire, and miss.  You will almost always miss your first few shots because the enemies are all so far away that most of the time you need to look at the tiny little mini-map to make sure that you’re actually pointing in the general direction of something.  Here we see the game’s first major flaw: turrets can’t move.  Since your enemies will never budge and the wind never changes force or direction, once you’ve managed to actually correct your aim so that you hit your target you’ll just hit the fire button over and over until they’re dead. This also works against you since as soon as one of the enemies decides to target you you’ve basically lost.  This is made even more frustrating by the fact that when up against more than one A.I. opponent they will almost always prefer to fire at you than at each other, giving you the impression that the game hates you so very much.  To make matters worse, there are occasionally planes that will fly by and drop bombs on you; bombs that you can’t avoid since you’re rooted in place.  They do give you the ability to try and shoot down the bombers but since they move in real-time, even while you play the game in turn based mode, most of the time they will pass by while it isn’t even your turn.  There are also a bunch of power-ups scattered around the maps, but none of them are really worth wasting a few turns trying to hit.

You can't tell from this screenshot, but the game freezes on this loading screen pretty often

There’s also a real-time mode that essentially removes all of the strategy from the game and replaces it with a mad scramble to aim and mash on the fire button but it really isn’t any more fun to play.  You can choose between four different turret types, each with their own special abilities, however only two of them really stand out.  One of these is a turret whose shot can be nudged left or right while in the air, making it significantly easier to hit your target.  The other turret of note is so overpowered that it breaks the game; after firing your shot you can self-destruct it in mid-air and take the shot over again after correcting your aim, as many times as you need in a single turn.  To counter this, your shots deal slightly less damage, but when you never miss a shot this barely makes a difference since you’ll destroy most enemies before they can even hit you.  There are also several different maps in the game, but aside from one stand-out the majority of them just seem like re-textured versions of the same geometry.

The game is also plagued by numerous bugs.  I’ve already mentioned that the stiff A.I. almost always targets you, but that’s really only the tip of the iceberg.  Around a third of the games that you try to play will end with the game locking up or crashing before it can finish loading. Another problem is that the random placement of turrets means that often there’s one turret that either can’t be hit or can’t hit anyone.

Rings is the only map that really stands out visually

Most of the textures in the game feel flat and bland.  The models are surprisingly well detailed, but this inconsistency with the texture quality gives most things a really strange unbalanced look.  There are a few cool effects like the way your camera follows your shot through the air, however the camera snaps back at the moment of impact so you don’t actually get to see any damage.  There are also some occasional graphics glitches, the most prominent of which is texture clipping on the planes.  Another problem is that your HUD is always so cluttered that attempting to see things in front of you can feel far difficult than it should be.

There’s really only one audio track in the game that loops over and over with a techno beat that suits the style of the game pretty well but it’s such a short piece that it ends up getting repetitive pretty quickly.  You’re also given the option to listen to your own music which I’m sure most people will prefer to use.  Aside from the music the only sounds you’ll hear are some passable explosions and the game’s female announcer whose robotic voice just sounds and pronounces words like a Microsoft Sam, so overall nothing really stands out.

Turn the volume up? To hear what?

Turret Wars really isn’t a good game.  It took a bad concept and somehow managed to make it worse.  While you are given quite a few options to change things up a bit and most of the bugs could eventually be ironed out with a patch, there are just so many poor design choices that it’s almost impossible to enjoy the final package.  This is a game that’s not worth playing no matter how inexpensive it is.

Score

MustTap Score: Broken Tap

Straight up busted! You won't get anything good out of this one.

Bottom Line
Certain aspects of the game might sound fun, but you're better off avoiding this one altogether.

Screenshots

Trak4 is a puzzle game by independent developer Keith Kolmos.

The Game

Here’s a hint, hope this helps!

Puzzle games are a genre especially rife for exploitation on Apple’s OS. Since many such games require no more than a few simple click controls to operate, puzzle games are developed on what’s probably a daily basis. This is no different from the PC, on which you’ve probably seen your parents or other casual gamers clicking away at one among literally millions of mind bending Flash puzzles. Trak4 is one such game: it sacrifices gameplay depth for a nearly nonexistent learning curve.

Puzzles may seem tricky at first.

You’re greeted with the entirety of the gameplay from the get-go, and your objective is simple: manipulate on-screen puzzle pieces to match a pattern flashed to you before the round. Each piece can only be rotated in four ways (no dragging pieces around like an actual puzzle) so you’re really only matching the colors. You’re given some time to complete the “puzzle,” and you’re flashed bits and pieces of the original pattern to help you out in case you get stuck. A round ends when you successfully orient the pieces and click a button telling the game that you’re done.

There’s not much beyond what I have just described, so it should be pretty easy for the reader to tell whether he/she will enjoy the core gameplay. As you successfully match patterns, your score increases, but this isn’t an ambitious enough game to include online leaderboards of any kind.

Solving the puzzles is only satisfying enough.

Graphics

While fancy graphics may be a little beyond the scope of a simple puzzle game, I’m not too impressed by the overall design: menus look very hastily put together and there aren’t any animations to speak of. Seeing the puzzle pieces actually rotate would have added a lot. Popcap games in particular feature great animations despite often having gameplay as simple as Trak4.

Sound

Honestly, you’re better off using the “play your own music” feature of the game, because the game sounds are unimpressive. You have a few sound effects for certain events such as starting a new game or solving a puzzle, then you have one sound for every time you switch a puzzle piece. As you can imagine, this gets very repetitive very quickly.

Conclusion

Trak4 is as straightforward as puzzle games get, and its gameplay can be summarized in a screenshot or in two sentences. More casual gamers might find it a nice and quick distraction, but personally, this really should be a free game.

Score

MustTap Score: Rusty Tap

It works, but I still wouldn't drink from it.

Bottom Line
Trak4 is a puzzle game that will confuse no one except those wondering why you have to give up a dollar to play it.

Screenshots

Sushi Mayhem is a cooking themed puzzle game with a twist from Brain Stain Entertainment.

The Game

Do you like match-3 puzzle games?  Do you like Diner Dash?  Sushi Mayhem sure hopes you do since it’s essentially a mixture of those two basic concepts and it works terrifically.  You play as the young apprentice sushi-maker tasked with mastering all of your grandfather’s sushi recipes so that you can take over the shop when he retires.

Drunken Customers = Happy Customers

The actual gameplay is pretty simple.  You slide ingredients bejewelled-style to try and match up 3 or more of the same type.  Matching 3 only grants you one of that particular ingredient, and you get a bonus ingredient for each additional one in the line.  As you play, customers will begin to line up at the top of the screen and place their various orders.  At the bottom you then select the ingredients that you need for whatever recipe the clients want and hit the big combine button.  The longer it takes you to fill the orders the angrier your clients get, meaning less tips for you.  Thankfully whenever you make your sushi the game will automatically hand it to the angriest customer which is one less thing to worry about for you.  Some customers will occasionally order two servings and it’s very important to realize that they will only pay when their whole order has been filled, meaning that if they leave angrily with only one sushi missing you’ve lost valuable ingredients.  To counter this you are given one bottle of Sake each day that you can give to an angry client to instantly restore all of their happiness.  This really helps you out in a tight spot and unused bottles carry over to the next day.

You’ll get only get a few seconds to prepare before customers start arriving

Each day you will be taught a new sushi recipe and given a sales goal that you have to reach before closing time.  There are 30 different sushi recipes to learn in the game, but to prevent the memorization from getting tedious your restaurant functions on a “daily specials” sort of scheme.  You’ll never really have to remember too many recipes at once and the number and difficulty of the recipes will slowly increase over the course of the game, keeping things pretty challenging and fun throughout. 

There are a few minor flaws in the gameplay that I should point out.  Occasionally you may find that you are severely lacking of a certain type of ingredient and there is absolutely none of it even on the board.  When this happens with the more recipe specific ingredients like tuna or crab it adds a level of challenge, forcing you to analyze your customers wants and use what you have intelligently.  The problem is that this sometimes happens with rice, which is an ingredient for literally everything, forcing you to watch as all of your customers slowly get angry and leave.  The other problem i had was the ending.  After mastering every recipe and earning the ownership of the restaurant the game abruptly ends, giving you your total score and then shipping you back to the main menu where if you want to continue playing you’ll have to start from scratch.  It would have been nice for the developers to include some sort of way to continue with all of the recipes unlocked and random recipes each day.

Graphics

Fun Fact: All the recipes in the game can be used to make real sushi!

The game has a really great cartoonish art-style to it with lots of bright colors and really well drawn sprites.  Each of the different ingredients has a unique shape and color making it easy to quickly spot what you’re looking for in the puzzle.  There are a few places where the images seem like the were drawn slightly smaller than the screen’s resolution and stretched, causing a bit of pixelization, but it’s nothing serious and it doesn’t detract from the fun of the gameplay at all.

Sound

Wait! Don’t leave yet! Your food is almost ready!

Loading up the game for the first time I was exited to hear some absolutely terrific menu music.  The cheery oriental tone seemed to fit the graphical style perfectly.  Now imagine my disappointment when I started my first game and the music cut out completely, leaving nothing but background silence and some occasional blip sound effects.  I agree that most players will probably choose to listen to their own music while playing anyways, but the problem here is that for some bizarre reason the game does everything in its power to stop you from listening to your own music.  You have to select the song beforehand, start a game and then hit play on your music.  On top of that, as soon as you try to enter any sort of menu, be it the game’s pause menu or the music control menu, the music cuts out again.  I found myself bringing up the menu to adjust my volume, having the music stop, closing it and then reopening it to hit play again.  Once you’ve gotten the hang of how to get your music into the game it becomes a bit less frustrating, but still it would have been great for developer Brain Stain Entertainment to better incorporate user’s music into their game.

Conclusion

Sushi Mayhem may not be a perfect puzzle game, but it really comes close.  The gameplay is extremely fun and can be very challenging without becoming tedious, and it has a great art-style that just fits.  It has a few unfortunate sound problems, and some continuation of the main game would be great, but all-in all this is a terrific puzzle game that should not be missed.

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
Sushi Mayhem is fun and challenging, looks great, and is great for a quick game to play. Unfortunately, once the game is done, it's done! And it's hard to listen to your own music.

Screenshots

TriColor is a match-3 puzzle game developed by MobiRate and published by ClickGamer.

Gameplay

Let’s face it, just about everyone in the world has played at least a few hours of Tetris, and at least one kind of puzzle game that challenged you to match 3 of the same colored shapes.  There may be hundreds of different versions of each available, but no matter how many different ones we play the mechanics have never really evolved that much.  This is where TriColor comes along.  The developers over at MobiRate decided to go the Reese’s cups way and got their match-3 game all up in their Tetris, with a result that works surprisingly well.

Gravity doesn’t work this way!!!

The premise is quite simple, colored blocks fall in small groups of 1 to 3 arranged in various Tetris-style shapes and you must rotate and place them to try and line up 3 in a row horizontally vertically or diagonally.  Just like its great grandfather Tetris, there is no physics system in play here, meaning that if one block from the falling piece comes to rest somewhere the entire thing stops as well, even if the block that touched formed a line.  The result is pieces that just sort of hang there in mid air confusingly and force you to try and navigate your pieces around and under them.  This effect gets even weirder if you can manage to eliminate some blocks underneath a floating one since it will drop down by the number of blocks removed from under it, but still keep the same floating distance.  While this can be pretty annoying for the first few games, I found that after a short time I was becoming accustomed to it and able to place my blocks to minimize floatage, so i guess you could say that this is just part of the game’s learning curve.  You can also set off chain reactions and rack up score multipliers by either lining up two sets of 3 at once or having falling blocks line up with 3 other blocks when they land, but more often than not this will be pure luck.

You are given two different methods of controlling the game, either with the on-screen buttons or by using your finger to drag the piece.  Let me establish this right here: You should not under any circumstances even attempt to play the game any other way than with the buttons.  The problem with the sliding controls is that they are too imprecise for a game like this.

Thank you TriColor, I do feel good!

More often than not I found myself dropping a piece when I tried to move it to the side, or moving it to the side and then dropping immediately if my finger slid down just a tiny bit, resulting in a few too many ragequits (which the home button is all too good at).  The button controls work excellently however, you have buttons at the bottom for left and right movement, tap the board to rotate and hit another button to drop.  Playing it this way feels exactly like playing classic Tetris and really helps you get a handle on the game.

Graphics

This game has a very simple look to it.  As I said earlier, you have basic tetris style block arrangements and as far as the pieces go that’s pretty much all there is to it.  Whenever you line up three or more blocks there’s a little lightning animation before your blocks explode.  You’ll also get some encouraging words of “GOOD” and “EXCELLENT” to give you a little pat on the back when you set off bigger chain reactions.  The addition of 3 different theme packs to choose from is a nice touch but it one of them is just a recolored version of the other and doesn’t actually change any shapes.  All in all, the graphics get the job done but won’t really blow your mind.

Different styles and the ability to make custom soundracks add some depth to the game

Sound

Much like the graphics, the sound design in this game is quite simple.  As you play TriColor you’ll be treated to a cheery little background tune that really fits with the style of the game.  The other sound effects are all similarly cheery, but are not at all obtrusive if you want to listen to your own music.  Speaking of your own music, TriColor has a really great “make your own play-list” feature built in.  It’s really easy to quickly choose a few songs for the game to cycle through while you play, and since that’s what almost everyone wants to do it’s great that the tools are built right in.

Conclusion

Overall TriColor might have a few strange design choices like the lack of gravity, but it really is a pretty good puzzle game, and at only $0.99 you can’t really complain.  I would definitely recommend this to anyone who’s a fan of Tetris or match-3 games and wants to try something new.

Score

MustTap Score: Iron Tap

It's technically solid, but what comes out is pretty plain.

Bottom Line
A pretty original mixture of two very familiar concepts that despite its few flaws is definitely worth playing

Screenshots

Gold Keeper is a simple new arcade game which is guaranteed to steal a few minutes of your time, so long as your gold doesn’t get stolen first. Developed by iDiwo Team.

The Game

Gold Keeper is designed as an arcade style beat’em up that puts you in the shoes, er, hooves of a demon looking to keep his gold from the greedy hands of the local human village. Sounds backwards, doesn’t it? In this case it’s not, and that’s part of the charm of the game, but we’ll get to that later.

Don’t think you want to be standing there, little buddy.

After putting an emulated joystick and single button in the corners of your horizontal iPhone, the game begins. The entirety of the game takes place in a single square room with holes in each corner, and your gold in the middle. Your demon is free to roam wherever he pleases, and your single button executes his basic attack. From the corners of the screen, two types of villagers will enter: armored and unarmored. The unarmored villagers go straight for the gold and then attempt to leave from the hole they came in, and the armored villagers are in it for your blood. The object of the game is to kill the villagers before they can leave with any of your gold, or before they kill you themselves. Your health is dictated by a single bar on the left end of the screen, and another bar, your special attack gauge, is on the right. The latter is done by pressing a large orange button next to the special attack gauge once it fills up, and when performed your demon will unleash a single-hit kill move to all enemies in a certain radius of you. Villagers will occasionally drop one of two items which are only meant to refill those two meters. That’s it. Sounds simple enough, right? Well it should, because this game isn’t meant to be complicated – just mindless arcadey fun.

As the game progresses, things will gradually get more difficult. More villagers will spawn at a time, and every minute or so a message will appear stating that villagers have gotten stronger. By this, they mean that they’ll either be hitting you harder or be able to take more hits than before. This increase in difficulty is offset by the fact that your demon gets powered up over time, as well. After a few minutes he is equipped with a hammer – giving him more reach and more power – and a few minutes after that is given a hatchet. The hatchet is the final weapon you receive, and certainly makes killing villagers that much more bloody and satisfying. However, from that point on the difficulty will rise exponentially, as you aren’t given anymore power-ups to balance the rising power of the villagers.

As a game with such little depth, it’s apparent that it’s only goal is to supply the player with short time wasting sessions, and I can proudly say that the game achieves this gloriously. While you won’t come away from this gameplay reflecting on how great it was, it will certainly distract you from that short-but-smelly bus ride or final stretch of Philosophy 101.

Graphics

Oh snap, owned.

Gold Keeper goes the extra mile in terms of one dollar games and provides you with fully 3D polygonal visuals. This is a nice surprise, and the overall experience benefits greatly from it. Simple arcade games can suffer if what you’re looking at isn’t visually appealing. Fortunately, this isn’t the case with Gold Keeper. It’s color palette may not pack a punch (the colors you’ll be seeing are mostly gray and red), the art is inspired, and the visuals and movement are smooth. Blood spews from every villager you murder, and the special attack actually comes with a nice explosion effect. The terrain of the cave has a great texture that stands out and gives great realism to the otherwise comical demon endeavor. Another nice surprise was in the animation work of the demon. Even though he only has one basic attack, the developers put in multiple animations for this attack (each with their own range and hitbox properties) so that the game was just a little less repetitive. Little additions like this are much appreciated, as it shows that even though the price of the game is dirt cheap, there was some love and effort put into it that makes it feel like a more expensive one.

Sound

A single track fills up the game’s soundtrack, and while it’s not a stand-out piece of orchestral work, it’s simple, and works well with the tone and style of the gameplay. The ability to listen to your own music while slicing villagers for minutes on end would’ve been nice, but this feature unfortunately isn’t available (I still wait for the day that this becomes a common feature…grr). Sound effects do the job: slicing a villager with a hatchet sounds like slicing a villager with a hatchet. Unfortunately, the game’s biggest downfall is in the voice of the demon. I’ll keep this simple: I don’t want to hear my character reciting a famous Joker line from The Dark Knight every time I kill someone. There’s a lot of killing going on in this game, and hearing those words repeated over and over again almost made me turn my entire phone off. Fortunately, we have the option to turn just the sound effects or music off if we desire, so this drawback can be remedied at a cost.

Additional Comments

Simplicity never means perfection, and Gold Keeper is no different. The game does suffer from some frustrating flaws that give the game difficulty that I don’t believe was intended by the developers. One example of this is the fact that the player must always keep a keen eye on his health bar, as it’s very difficult to tell when your demon actually receives damage. There is no consistent sound or visual cue that represents health depletion aside from the meter itself, and this often left me surprised at how far down my health was without even being aware of it. The second and more concrete example is the useless special attack. The special attack is meant to work as a means of clearing large amounts of enemies that are close to you for tactical or desperate means, but it doesn’t work for either because the attack takes about 10 seconds to come out. All the while, the enemies that are close to you are hacking away at your health, and even if you manage to kill them before you die, you’ll be lucky to recover even a fraction of that from a health drop. On the bright side, if you manage to hold your own and believe you’ve accomplished a great feat, the game does offer worldwide leaderboards, so if you’re looking to turn this game into more than what it’s meant to be, you’ll at least be able to show off your talents.

Conclusion

Minor flaws aside, Gold Keeper is a pleasant (or should I say devilish) game which holds firm it’s arcade principles and uses them to deliver a solid experience that will easily kill time…and villagers. iPhone games are already in the thousands, and out of those thousands, it’s simple, casual games like Gold Keeper that show the virtues of mobile gaming. For your 99 cents, you could do a lot worse.

Score

MustTap Score: Iron Tap

It's technically solid, but what comes out is pretty plain.

Bottom Line
Gold Keeper is a devilish game that has a light-hearted charm. It's simple arcade gameplay is executed well enough to justify the price. Pick it up if you want to kill ten minutes with something new.

Screenshots

geoDefense is a tower defense game developed by Critical Thought Games.

The Game

The Vortex tower can blow up to kill almost everything with its Rainbow of Doom.

geoDefense is another tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod. By now, most people are aware of the concept behind tower defence, but just in case: You build towers to kill enemies, known as creeps, before they get to the end point. There are two different types of tower defense games: the ones that let you block creeps and create paths for them to navigate, and those that have pre-designed paths for the creeps. geoDefense falls in the latter category. The gameplay of geoDefense consists of you placing and upgrading towers. It controls well, but in reality it is hard to screw gameplay that simple up. Each of the stages consists of a different path that is diverse enough to not feel like it was copied and pasted with a little change.

Though the game may seem simple and easy, geoDefense requires much strategy to win. Placement is key in the game. For each tower you want maximum exposure to the creeps. Sometimes this means putting a laser tower at the end of a lane or a blaster tower as close to as many lanes as possible. After getting a good placement strategy down, you need to get a good balance of upgrading towers and buying new ones. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but each level will, most of the time, challenge you to learn how to beat it. Unfortunately, this results in a focus on trial and error gameplay. This can be overlooked, but in geoDefense, it takes away from the gameplay experience.

Graphics

The graphics in geoDefense feel like they are pulled straight from Geometry Wars. Everything from the grid background to the different types of creeps. When the creeps die, they explode into a brilliant firework display full of colors. This is a good trade off from the simple puff of smoke, or nothing at all, that other games use. Though the graphics are simplistic, they are very well done.

Sound

geoDefense does not have too much sound diversity in the game. There is the basic menu sounds, the various shooting sounds, the creep death sound, and the countdown sounds. The sound isn’t bad, but like the graphics, they are very simplistic. The nice part is that you can listen to you songs while you play the game, and you do not have to worry about the soundtrack going while you do so.

Failure IS an option in geoDefense.

Additional Comments

Chances are that if you are a tower defense fan, you have played this game before. For the newcomers to this genre, it is easy to recommend this as an entry level game to play. It isn’t perfect, but it will give a better idea for what good tower defense games are than most that are out on the iPhone and iPod.

Conclusion

geoDefense is the best fixed course tower defense game I have played for the iPhone so far. This being said, its competition does not give much of a fight. [Editor's Note: Star Defense could give it a run for its money.] Sometimes the game gets old, but it is a very good tower defense game nonetheless. This game should be on your Application list, if not on your device, if you are a fan of TD or strategy games.

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
geoDefense is a solid tower defense game for the iPhone and iPod Touch that can occasionally become boring and old, but with bright and colourful graphics, is definitely one of the better tower defense games available.

Screenshots

Cube Runner is an action game written by Andy Qua.

The Game

Avoid the colored blocks at all costs. Because! They’re blocks!

As an older game in the iPhone’s ever-expanding library, Cube Runner is one among a wave of many that use the phone’s tilt functionality, a feature undoubtedly included with games in mind. Nowadays, “tilt games” are far from ubiquitous, and this fact would lead one to assume that customers have gotten over the idea of rocking their devices back and forth to play. Cube Runner, however, is far from gimmicky and is a solid example of a good tilt game.

Basically, you are in control of a ship or an airplane or something else that an arrow might represent. Yes, the game’s graphics are simplistic enough that your in-game avatar is all but an arrow. Your task is to guide this arrow ship through a zone of obstacles, which happen to all be squares. Your ship/arrow/aircraft moves at a constant rate while your tilting turns you left and right, allowing you to weave back and forth through the squares. Each “level pack” consists of a semi-organized placement of squares along the “track,” and the game ships with three: easy, medium, and hard.

Seems like I have crashed into a wall and disintegrated. Oh well.

There is an intended learning curve to the game, especially to someone new to the idea of tilt games. A new player will undoubtedly die at least the first few times through, and the fact that you have to repeat from the beginning every time can be a source of frustration. The controls are fair, but rely on the often imprecise accelerometer. As such, it’s hard to say whether anyone can adjust to the gameplay.

Graphics

“Minimalist” and “industrial” are putting it one way, but I prefer to call it lazy. The graphics consist of box, box, box, box box, box, and your space ship. Or rather, your triangle. Meanwhile, I appreciate that the game maintains a high frame rate, but boxes spawn into your view way too close. While this particular flaw might be a design decision to keep the difficulty up, would it really have hurt to add a few textures here and there?

Sound

The game has one musical track that plays for the duration of your current life, with no sound effects to distract you other than the one when you crash into a box and die (how would there be any? you’re just navigating through textureless squares, after all). I’m a fan of music in games, especially music that befits the game, and so I actually like the track in Cube Runner, if only for its techno influences that match the game’s visual style.

Conclusion

Cube Runner is a fun little game, and while I wouldn’t quite call it addictive, gamers will surely feel the need to fine tune their tilt skills a bit more every time. I would probably like to see a game with a higher budget with Cube Runner’s gameplay, but for the very reasonable price of $0, I don’t think you can go wrong. If there’s one feature that I would have included, it would have been online leaderboards – I need to show people how far I made it on Hard!

Score

MustTap Score: Iron Tap

It's technically solid, but what comes out is pretty plain.

Bottom Line
Cube Runner is a nice and simple tilt game with which to pass the time on train rides, but gamers expecting anything more should look elsewhere.

Screenshots

Hover Poker is a multi-player poker game developed by Jormy Games and published by Clickgamer.

The Game

You’re sitting at the poker table, you take a look at your cards and decide that you could definitely take the hand. You raise $100, take a breath, and look around. Your opponents are analyzing your every facial expression and your every gesture for any sign that you are bluffing. You pretend to nervously look away and your opponent immediately jumps on the chance to call your raise. Perfect, you’ve got them right where you want them, so you decide to take a sip of your soda and check the time. You’ve been playing Hover Poker this entire time! Your opponent? Your buddy, sitting right next to you.

You really are surrounded by your opponents, but they are more than likely your friends, as Hover Poker lets you essentially play multi-player poker with the same device, passing it around for different turns. All cards are hidden, and when it is your turn you simply touch and hold on the two peek buttons to take a look at your hand. There is a peek counter, which is a great touch, so should the counter not be zero when it is your turn and the device is passed to you, go ahead and punch whomever just passed it to you in the arm – they looked at your cards! All the usual rules of poker apply, small and big blinds pay their antes automatically, best hand wins, and you can fold, call, or raise.

The user interface could definitely use some improvement. When you wish to check, you are forced to hit the “Call” button, which logically makes sense but should definitely change to a “Check” button as to not confuse others. In addition, when raising your bet, you are given the choice between the more and less button which works in increments of $10, or the slider which lets you increase your bet much quicker but inaccurately. Lastly, going all-in is quite annoying when you have a larger amount of chips on hand, would suggest an “All-In” button that would make it much easier!

Graphics

The graphics behind Hover Poker are nothing special, they are clear and they work, cannot really complain about it because I wouldn’t expect poker to have extraordinary graphics.

Sound

The verbal cues that the in-game announcer gives you are very helpful in letting you know what the actions of the previous players have been and whose turn it is. There is no other music present in Hover Poker, but that is to be expected.

Conclusion

Hover Poker delivers everything that a multiplayer, one device, portable poker game advertises: quick and simple games of poker that can be played up to six people. There really isn’t much more to it other than that, and a single player mode or an online multiplayer mode would be great additions.

Score

MustTap Score: Iron Tap

It's technically solid, but what comes out is pretty plain.

Bottom Line
Hover Poker delivers exactly as advertised: a quick and portable way to play poker with your friends, but not much more. The user interface could use some improvements and a single player and online mode would be great additions. Worth taking a look at for poker fans.

Screenshots

Flight Control is an action/strategy game by Melbourne developer and publisher Firemint.

The Game

The game can seem easy at first…

The objective in Flight Control is deceptively simple – guide airplanes and helicopters to landing strips and helipads to increase your score. However, as gamers are well aware, simple rarely means easy, and Flight Control is an example of a game that offers significant challenge despite its insignificant learning curve. Add just the right amount of networking features and what you get is a goal all too familiar to us – beat other peoples’ high scores!

…but the difficulty ramps up minutes or even seconds in.

There is only one control in the game: point aircraft in the direction you want them to fly. This is accomplished by dragging a line from the plane in question to the desired direction. The system is very intuitive: you can give it a quick swipe to just reorient the craft, or you can keep your finger held down and drag a flight path around the map. Either way, the aircraft are selflessly obedient and will follow your orders, even to the death. Once two airplanes (or an airplane and a helicopter, or two helicopters) touch in any way, the game is over. Finally, points are scored by successfully landing the aircraft in pre-designated runways and helipads. There are a few rules and they all make sense; red planes can only land on the red runway, for instance.

That one paragraph sums up the entirety of the gameplay mechanics. The fun of the game comes from having to delegate orders to planes as they come in from the edges of the maps (there a few you can choose from, including an aircraft carrier, my favorite one). Like many arcade games that are built around preventing people from getting high scores, the game starts off very easy but as more aircraft come in, the difficulty ramps up exponentially. To keep your sanity in check the game automatically quicksaves if you press the Home button in the middle of a round. Nevertheless, it gets very hard very quickly. If you deign to check out the screenshots in this review, try not to laugh at my pathetic attempts at a high score.

The visual and aural cues are done very well. Here I have just landed a plane, making me ‘commendable.’

Basing an iPhone game around getting a high score is, of course, useless without implementing the proper tools to allow players to compare and brag about their own scores. Like many, the developers of Flight Control have realized this, and so the game comes with a number of features that allows you to compare scores with others. You can check how you fare against every other Flight Control player in the world; specifically, which percentile you fall under. Apparently you can also link your score to Google Maps and see scores of people around you. I suppose having the highest score in town beats knowing you’re below average worldwide. There’s also Twitter integration, in case you feel like showing off to your e-friends outside the iPhone world.

Graphics

Flight Control has a presentable interface and clean, nice 2D graphics. I liked the developers dedication to the aesthetic they chose for the menus and such, and I was never once confused by graphical elements during gameplay. Different types of planes and helicopters are easily distinguishable and the “route line” that’s drawn for you when you command a plane is very helpful. There are no guns and explosions to be seen in Flight Control, but there certainly don’t need to be, and what is here works.

Sound

There is just the right amount of sound in Flight Control. Thankfully the planes are quiet – can you imagine hearing the separate drones of 15 different airplanes on screen at once? Every command you make has audible feedback and the sound effect played when planes are landed is just the right kind of satisfying. The game even offers to turn off sound at the beginning, in case you’d rather play your own music. When the micromanagement finally becomes too much, and you find yourself failing to prevent an air traffic accident, the “crash” sound will surely make you wince the first couple of times.

There is no music during the game itself, but that would probably only serve to distract the player. I’d also like to stress that the brief menu music played when you start a new game fits the visual theme of the game perfectly.

Conclusion

Flight Control is a textbook example of how to strike just the right balance of simplicity and depth. It’s cliche, but this really is a game that can be enjoyed by all audiences. Casual players will enjoy trying to top themselves, and more hardcore gamers will be taking full advantage of the online features the game sports. See you on the leaderboards, air traffic controllers!

Score

MustTap Score: Golden Tap

The best of the best; everything about this is perfect.

Bottom Line
Flight Control is a fun and challenging game that will please serious gamers with its high score sharing features and satisfy the rest because of its pick-up-and-play accessibility.

Screenshots

Rolando is a puzzle adventure game developed by HandCircus and published by ngmoco:).

The Game

Reflecting light off of a rotating platform is quite a pain.

Rolando is a fun puzzle/adventure game that uses the accelerometer and touch screen features of the iPhone and iPod Touch. You control most Rolandos by tilting the device to make them move from around. You use the touch screen for menu navigation, interacting with objects in the game like elevators and hinges, and selecting Rolandos. You can also make the Rolandos jump by flicking your finger up on the screen. Occasionally, some Rolando commandos will be under your control, these spiky ball stick to surfaces and jump to other surfaces on your command. You learn the basics through tutorial levels, but the basics do take quite some time to get down.

Your goal is to get a certain number of Rolandos through a door. Sometimes, this can be simple, but at times it is actually much harder than it seems. For each stage there are medals for beating the stage within the time limit and collecting all the gems. This is great because it gives the perfect challenge for each stage and increases replay value. Though you don’t get a medal, it is fun to try to do all of them in one go. One of the best features of Rolando is iSave, essentially an anti-rage-quitting tool that will save your spot should you leave the game, for any reason.

You can change gravity, on some stages, by rotating the device on it’s sides.

My biggest complaint of Rolando is that it has been done before. If you haven’t played LocoRoco, let me get you up to speed. It looks, feels, and plays exactly like Rolando, minus the iPhone/iPod Touch features. The features added for the iPhone/iPod platform does make, obviously in my opinion, Rolando a better game, but it bothers me that they are so similar, like HandCircus and ngmoco:) were not trying to make an original game.

Graphics

Rolando’s graphics are acceptable. The game is very charming in every sense, such as the pop-up book level selector, the colors, and the Rolando’s themselves, just to name a few. Everything is nicely colored or not colored, like the enemies. It has a good feel about it. I hate to say describe a game like this, but the graphics can best be summed up as cute.

The pop-up level selector is one of many little things that make it charming.

Sound

Like the graphics, Rolando’s sound effects are just as good. There isn’t a whole lot of detail to go into about them, but it is definitely a game to have the sound up all the way, or under 80% of maximum volume if your using headphones. Safety first! The music, though hard to describe, works in perfect harmony with the rest of the game. Once again, I do have to advise playing this game with the sound on.

Additional Comments

Rolando is one game that is hard to put down. Once you get going, it always seems to be, “one more medal” or, “one more stage.” The game is dangerously addicting at best. There is plenty of content through the many stages, both bonus and regular, the medals, and just playing the game to play it. Even if you have played the LocoRoco series, Rolando is still a game worth picking up.

Conclusion

Rolando is the perfect game for anyone looking to get a game for his or her iPhone or iPod Touch. The game is full of content and is just plain addicting. It is quite sad to know that ngmoco:) was planning taking Rolando off the App Store when Rolando 2 came out, but don’t fret, it is still there. With a $5.99 USD price tag, I can easily say it is worth every penny. If you get done with this and are itching for more, be sure to check out Rolando 2 or the LocoRoco games.

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
Rolando is a good puzzle adventure game that will please anyone who plays it. It has the perfect balance of difficulty, so it will not turn anyone off from it. Rolando is one of the games that should be bought by anyone who has an iPhone or iPod Touch.

Screenshots