Bulkypix recently announced that their new action-puzzle game, Saving Private Sheep, has just hit the app stores.

Check out the trailer:

Another vampire themed adventure game here for you folks – Vampire Origins from IceHill Games and published by Chillingo is set to be released in the app store real soon.

Here is the description from Chillingo:

Vampire Origins is a hot new 3D shooter, an isometric adventure title coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The game pits Dracula’s arch-rival Van Helsing against legions of underworld creatures. If you fancy Gothic adventures paired with intense fighting, Vampire Origins will boil the blood in your veins.

If you’ve ever played Diablo, you’ll feel right at home with Vampire Origins. A simple battle system ditches complex inventory and weaponry in favor of a point-and-click approach of attacking creatures by tapping them. It may sound boring on paper, but the fast-paced action balances things out. Fast, very agile enemies leave you little time to ponder your next move or marvel Gothic architecture. Although Vampire Origins is an adventure, with some puzzles and lots of exploration, action and killing enemies come before everything else.

And here is a gameplay video:

Looks like a solid game that is action packed. We can’t wait to hear more about it. Here are some screenshots!

Guerrilla Bob, from Angry Mob Games and published by Chillingo, has hit the app stores!

Description from Chillingo:

Guerrilla Bob supersedes the ordinary survival shooter experience by providing elements of depth and complexity never before met with any iPhone games of its genre.
It goes beyond circling endless waves of enemies, and adds structured level designs and various challenges.

Level by level, follow Bob to taste the thrill for the kill! You must help Bob make his way through the dangerous canyons, steep deserts and dreadful towns. To do this, he must not only survive the countless attacks, but also explore the land in search of new arsenal and secret items. To make things even more challenging, Bob gets some epic boss encounters.

Here is the extended gameplay video:

And a whole whack of screenshots of some of the enemies you will find in Guerrilla Bob:

The game looks so fun – we can’t wait to get our hands on it! Review soon.

A very cool idea, dubbed Project 72 from Dog Town Studios, has just hit the app store. Here’s the description:

STORY

Project 72 begun Tuesday January 5, when 4 boys from Venice CA aka Dogtown sat down for dinner and started to discuss what to do next. The idea of making a game in 72 hours started to take place. A few hours later at 8pm the project was officially on its way, deadline set to Friday January 8 at 8pm . Were they gonna finish it in time?

They did and this game is the result!

GAME

You guide your rocket through space avoiding running out of fuel and hitting all the obstacle.
When you collide with an obstacles you either slow down or get eliminated

* Asteroids and satellites will cause the ship to slow down.
* Black holes will pull you towards them until you run out of fuel and get stuck in space (GAME OVER!).
* UFO’s should be avoided at all cost as they will destroy you on the spot.

In order to travel far into space you need rocket fuel, there are fuel power-up’s that appear randomly throughout the game and you need to pick up as many as possible. There are also other power-up’s to help you on your mission such as a Shield and some Nitro.

Very polished looking game! Check out the screenshots:

DarkSonar, a new kind of submarine battle game, from TriApps has just hit the appstore! Here is the description of the app:

Missions
Find the enemies and destroy them.
Locate the base of the enemies and destroy it.
You must help our allied mother ship not to be sunken,
You must help our allies to destroy all the enemies.
And so on.

Weapons
You can switch your weapon at any time during the battles (missions) : like torpedo, homing, mine, bomb and decoy (If your ship is upgraded to use it)
Don’t forget to upgrade your weapons more powerful (Damage, Weapon Speed, etc)

Features
Single play mode only
Total 14 missions are included
Upgrade screen after each mission
Dynamic battles with great sounds
Intuitive user interfaces and easy to control
Prologue and Credits at the end of this game.

Here is a gameplay video:

The game looks really cool – I have never seen anything like this before. We’re going to try to get our hands on it and give it a good review.

Just learned that Mortal Skies – Modern War Air Combat Shooter by Erwin Jansen has just hit the app store. I’m a huge fan of shmups, and this game looks great. Here are is a gameplay video:

And here are some screenshots:

Game looks fantastic – despite reports of its difficulty. Probably going to pick it up sometime later this week. Hope you all enjoy it!

Mission: Deep Sea is an undersea exploration game from Hiccup Studios and Chillingo.

In the far flung future mankind needed a way to carry out dangerous and complicated undersea missions. They turned to the most logical tool for the job. You guessed it: Telepathically controlled cloned sea turtles.

Let me run that past you again.

Telepathically controlled cloned sea turtles.

Thus we have the premise of Mission: Deep Sea. You’ll play as the pilot of one such turtle, taking on various missions with the main goal of saving the environment.  The game’s controls are pretty intuitive and original.  Each half of the screen controls one of the turtle’s front flippers, so you end up making actual swimming motions to move around. After only a few minutes of practice I was easily maneuvering the undersea terrain. I should also mention that the graphics are pretty good in this game. The sand textures look pretty believable and the water itself has a good murky look to it that gives you a feel for how dark things can be underwater. Your turtle itself looks great and animates fluidly, which is great because you’ll be staring at its back for the entire length of the game.

Turtle! Turtle! Turtle!

It’s quite unfortunate that my praise for Mission: Deep Sea has to stop here because the most important factor, the game part, is a poorly designed and boring mess. You’ll only have 5 missions to play through before the credits roll and each mission only takes around 3-4 minutes to complete. There is only one mission that stood apart from the others and actually took me about 15 minutes to complete and that was only because it was so poorly designed that you end up swimming around aimlessly until you find your objective. Also, four out of five missions task you with doing the exact same thing.  You may be given some sort of different context each time, but in the end all you really do is position yourself in front of your objective to win. Even then, the game can be overly picky about positioning. The second mission tries to mix things up a bit by making you try and catch up to a moving target, and trust me when I say that this is the only remotely fun mission in the game. It’s never a good sign when your game peaks at the second level. The last mission is actually the only one that plays differently but unfortunately its so terribly designed that it just ends up being immensely frustrating.

There is a story here that the developers try to squeeze in during the last missions in order to give some semblance of a need for a sequel.  Overall though, its pretty generic and easily forgotten. I also feel the need to rant a bit about the environmental protection themes present throughout the game. Let me be perfectly clear that I actually strongly support protecting the environment, but the way the game approaches the subject is just childish. In reality, sea turtles are an endangered species. In the game, this is no longer a problem because we simply solved it through cloning. Also, if you ever accidentally swallow a plastic bag (The only way to fail most missions.) you’ll be informed that everything is okay and the bag was removed through an easy and painless procedure, instead of the truth that your poor innocent sea turtle just died. Overall I found that this approach just trivialized an important issue.

You'd think that the only two cutscenes in the game would have actually been proofread

Overall, Mission: Deep Sea is a couple of great ideas held down by some absolutely terrible ones. The missions are repetitive and poorly designed, so much so that I simply cannot recommend it to anyone. Hopefully these significant flaws will be corrected in the eventual sequel.

Score

MustTap Score: Rusty Tap

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

Bottom Line
Though it may seem interesting from the onset, Mission: Deep Sea just has too many flawed ideas for it to be worth your money.

Screenshots

Another great freebie for the weekend is Hippo High Dive from Imangi Studios, the people who brought you Harbor Master!

Grab it while you can!

Viderea announced recently that they are releasing a fantastic looking 3D flight combat game on February 10, 2010 – X Invasion 2. Here is the description:

Game Brief

Earth Date: 2.10.2010

We thought they came in peace. We thought they would bring knowledge. We thought they would bring salvation.

We were wrong.

Hostile aliens have invaded San Francisco, and you are Mankind’s last line of defense. Train Hard,
Be Brave, Fight with Courage, and Godspeed!

Game Features:

X Invasion 2 is the first 3D Reality Based Game for the iPhone/iPod platform to incorporate Viderea’s patent pending TruView Technology. With TruView, users can fly freely over 10,000 square miles of photorealistic and geographically accurate views of the San Francisco Bay Area.

X Invasion 2 has 3 modes of play:

1. Campaign Mode. 16+ unique and intense missions that will test your skill, your accuracy, and your will. This is not the same mission recycled over and over again (ie destroy 1 plane, destroy 2 planes, destroy this plane, destroy that plane,etc). Instead each mission is unique — intense dogfights, follow the leader, aerial rollercoasters, airport landing, night patrol, bombing runs, a final mothership, and more!

2. Arcade Mode. Nonstop action lets you compete for the top spot on our global high scores list. In this mode, you can take on wave after wave of aliens over the vast San Francisco Bay Area. This what true 3D arcade action is meant to be!

3. Tour Mode. Relax and take a virtual tour of the San Francisco Bay Area. Get in your helicopter and enjoy the scenery. Roam freely and see everything in photorealistic quality — downtown San Francisco, the Golden Gate, San Jose, Oakland, Stanford, Berkeley, Silicon Valley, it’s all there and more. You can save interesting photos to your photo album and even share them with others.

Here is a video of the gameplay:

This game looks amazing and seems to run really smooth, can’t wait to get my hands on it! I wish it had online multiplayer or even local multiplayer, but we’ll see what else they can add with it.

iDiwo Team has announced that they have sent in Gold Keeper II for review by Apple, so we should expect it soon! Not only are they updating Gold Keeper I, but they are integrating the following features in Gold Keeper II:

- 5 switchable weapons
- 5 enemies
- bosses
- achievments
- Open Feint support
- new visuals

And a new promo video to go along with it:

We thought the original Gold Keeper was decent – needed a bit more content. Let’s see what iDiwo Team can do with this one!