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!

Cogs is an incredible machine-type of puzzle game from Lazy 8 Studios and published by Chillingo.

I am a huge fan of Incredible Machines. I played that game non-stop when I was a lot younger, all the way up to just about last week! Well, Cogs isn’t exactly Incredible Machines, but it certainly does bring up quite a few memories of Incredible Machines.

Cogs is a great puzzle game where you are tasked with solving the problem at hand: you need a bell to be chimed, you need to redirect gas from the source to the balloon or output or whatever, or you need to crank the Jack-in-the-box to come out of his damned hidey hole. Regardless of the task at hand, you are judged by your solution, the time it takes to find that solution, as well as the number of moves it took you to find that solution. Just keep shifting those tiles!

This blue gas tastes funny.

To shift a tile, you just tap on it and it moves to the open space. You can also shift multiple tiles (Which counts as one move!) if you have more than one or two in a line that you want to move. There are also little dynamics of moving around gears and possibly other items, where if you move a gear into other gears, you are probably going to cause the other gears you are touching to spin. Usually not a problem, until you find a puzzle where you have to do things in a synchronized fashion – pain in the bum.

The mechanics of this game are fantastic – you are either working on a flat board, or a cube that you can rotate by tapping with two fingers and dragging. It really takes this type of puzzle game to the next level, making you keep tabs of ALL of the sides that you need to solve as well as making sure you do it in a timely and minimalistically as possible. The art is great – completely 3D and very well done graphics which ran smoothly on my 3GS.

I would do this naturally anyway!

If I could complain about anything, it’s the rather unimaginative achievements available on the Crystal platform, but that’s not really a fault to speak of. Speaking of which, and this doesn’t count toward the review, this was my first interaction with the Crystal social gaming platform. I have to say, it is incredibly polished and definitely a contender for OpenFeint and Plus+! Actually, there are only 10 puzzles available to you when you first purchase the game. That seems pretty short for a game like this, and that is a rather silly problem.

Overall, Cogs is a brilliant game – I’m still trying to finish all of the puzzles in Inventor mode, and then I’m going to run through Challenge mode and try to get this brain thinking again. There are no real shortcomings to speak of, it’s a load of fun that works your brain, it looks great, and the game mechanics work brilliantly. Unfortunate that you have to purchase the puzzles outside of the first 10 that they include, but definitely still gotta check it out.

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
Brilliant puzzle game through and through, mixing traditional tile sliding action with objects that interact with each other on a 3D grid. Challenging from the start with so many different types of objectives, puzzle fans, definitely grab this game!

Screenshots

Dracula: The Path of the Dragon is a point-and-click adventure game from Tetraedge Games and published by Chillingo.

Boy, it sure is foggy in ... Transylvania.

Dracula: The Path of the Dragon is the first in a three game series that originated on the PC as a point-and-click adventure game similar to the vein of Jules Verne’s Return to Mystery Island that we have also reviewed. With that said: there isn’t much of a difference.

Sure, there’s a different setting and storyline, but it’s a simple point-and-click adventure game where you go around talking to people, taking objects, and using those objects on those people you have spoken to or on other objects. The storyline itself is pretty gripping though, here’s a sneak peek:

Dracula: The Path of the Dragon is set in 1920, casting you in the role of Father Arno Moriani, who is sent to investigate a potential candidate for sainthood in Transylvania.

A saint! In Transylvania! Oh for sure she’s a vampire. Chillingo sent over a game walkthrough that I didn’t end up using because I didn’t want to spoil the story for anyone – but I’m pretty sure she’s a vampire. The gameplay mechanics are pretty simple – touch and drag to look around, tap to interact, and… well that’s about it. You have a pretty robust inventory full of items (Eventually) that will be able to interact with a lot of different things.

Check out that hot stud... oh wait that's me!

The art of the game is beautiful – beautifully rendered 3D-ish settings with well animated sprites of all of the different characters in the game. The music fits the mood very well and the port over from the PC was done pretty darn flawlessly.

Overall, Dracula: The Path of the Dragon is a pretty average game – nothing blew me away and there wasn’t really much to review other than the storyline and gameplay mechanics. The story will definitely keep you interested if you’re into these sort of games, so definitely check it out!

Score

MustTap Score: Iron Tap

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

Bottom Line
Wonderful port of a great point-and-click adventure game from the PC and has great artwork and story behind it. Other than that however, just an average game.

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.

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

Chillingo has let us know that Cogs, by Lazy 8 Studios, will be submitted very soon to the app store. Here is the description of the game:

Cogs is a groundbreaking puzzle game, where players build increasingly complex machines using sliding tiles in 2D and 3D environments. Multiple gameplay modes and difficulty levels are available. New puzzles are unlocked by building contraptions against the clock with as few moves as possible. This visually stunning and fantastic sounding game is perfect for puzzle fans of any age and ability!

And they even included a great gameplay trailer:

The game looks magnificent – maybe it’s just the inner Incredible Machines fanboy in me talking, but the game looks amazing. It looks like Pipe Dream and Incredible Machines had a love child, and the love child was dipped in holy water. We can’t wait to get our hands on it, and we’ll hopefully have a review up as soon as it comes out!

Chillingo just gave us a heads up that Dracula: The Path of the Dragon, the third in the Dracula series and first on the iPhone/iPod Touch, developed by Tetraedge Games has just hit the app stores!

The story is as such:

Dracula: The Path of the Dragon is set in 1920, casting you in the role of Father Arno Moriani, who is sent to investigate a potential candidate for sainthood in Transylvania.

Solving a series of complex and engaging puzzles based on medicine, history, and the occult, you follow a trail of evil through the World War I-decimated village of Vladoviste to uncover the secrets of The Path of the Dragon and come face to face with Dracula himself.

Here are some screenshots:

Looks like a challenging puzzle game, and we’re going to give it a review sometime soon – stay tuned!

It looks like the good folks over at Steamroller Studios have updated Super Shock Football! Here are the list of the features they have implemented:

- Added ability to “Nudge” players. This gives you a new level of control while still keeping with the spirit of the original game. (Feature can be turned off)
- Tackling works better now and is more consistent.
- Players are a little less random, run a little straighter.
- Added option to turn off the passing timer we added in the 1.1 update.
- Newest (and by far the best) version of Open Feint added.
- Added ability to play the game with a fixed overhead angle.
- Fixed some bugs

As you can see, a lot of the issues we had during our review seem to have been taken care of including the less random movement of the players. This is great news, and on the TouchArcade forums, they had discussed adding a Season mode as well as online multiplayer. This game just keeps getting better and better!

Apparently the update isn’t out yet, but the Lite version, which incorporates the new features, has hit the app stores!

A new trailer for Guerilla Bob from Angry Mob Games and published by Chillingo has been released and shows one important detail – the involvement of John Gore from Minigore. In fact, he’s the end boss!

Check out the trailer:

Guerilla Bob will apparently be submitted this week, so we definitely look forward to it hitting stores.

Via: TouchArcade

UPDATE: Chillingo just sent us the background story behind Guerilla Bob.

Guerrilla Bob Story
It all started with two best friends. Bob and John Gore have been friends since they were 10, and continued to be best buddies through high school, and then through college.

Eventually, Bob decided to enroll in the army, while John Gore chose a life of crime and money.

Bob got great achievements and got promotion after promotion, until he got to be a national hero.

Jealous of his success, John Gore set him up so that Bob would look like a corrupt soldier. So Bob was kicked out of the army.

With nothing left to do, Bob decided to get REVENGE, and became a rebel.
From then on, he would go by the name Guerrilla Bob. One day, Bob found that the army had a plan to nuke the place where his old friend John Gore had his troops. He sabotaged the plan, so he’d go in by himself and hunt them down one by one.

Sounds like a great brand that complements Minigore so well. They’re doing some final Crystal testing with it, and will be submitted soon!

Inkvaders is a side-scrolling action game from Games Faction and published by Chillingo.

Imagine all of those campy science fiction movies where aliens are coming to invade the Earth and asking to be taken to your leaders, you know the ones, with the big lightbulb heads and bug eyes? Alright, take those aliens, and put them into a comic book with a macho hero who has a huge arsenal of guns at his disposal. Great, now… put that onto the iPhone as a playable game.

WHY ARE THERE SO MANY?!

That just about sums up Inkvaders. This great side-scrolling action game has you blasting your way through three different settings with many levels in each area, collecting power ups and cash so you can purchase the next big gun for your arsenal. You spend much of your time blasting through aliens or jumping with your jetpack, and the goal is simple: survive and make it to the end of the level.

At your disposal are a huge array of weapons that you can purchase via vending machines peppered throughout the levels, and you generate cash by killing those aliens or collecting moon rocks for money! On top of that, health and ammunition boxes are pretty easy to find – just tap them to grab them. The coolest part was this purple box with the capital letter ‘R’ on it which, when activated, starts up the “Rush” where a huge number of aliens will run toward you and it is your task to pop some caps into said alien asses.

The art direction is fantastic, it’s very comic book-style, as I mentioned earlier and the screenshots really do not do this game any justice. The backgrounds are all animated and detailed, and the quality of the art work is just astounding. The sound of the game is amazing – the sweet sound of your shotgun splattering the brains of the closest aliens next to you, your jetpack firing as you jump over an alien only to put a bullet in the back of its head, and the intense music that gets you pumped up to commit the previous acts of murder.

If I were to complain about anything, it would be about how repetitive Inkvaders can become – you’re basically just holding onto the right arrow and hitting the shoot button whenever aliens come onto the screen. With that said, the variety of weapons definitely compensates for this as you’re just obliterating aliens in as many ways as you feel fit. Speaking of which, the weapons available in Inkvaders are just great, they all have their different strengths and weaknesses that will come into play.

Don't mess with the guy with the chaingun.

Overall, Inkvaders is incredibly fun but without much depth to it. I would imagine that once you finish it, there really isn’t much incentive to go back and play it again unless you enjoy the mind-numbing alien massacre – which I did. Definitely a very fun game, so we do suggest you check it out!

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
A great side-scrolling action game where you blast the crap out of aliens with as many weapons as you can afford and carry. Want to blow up aliens and have a couple minutes to play a stage? Inkvader is what you need.

Screenshots