Small Wonders has just recently announced that Battle of Puppets, their really awesome looking strategy game has just been released!

Here is the description:

Battle of Puppets casts its player in the role of a silent puppeteer, who must strategically control his hordes of marionette minions and send them across the show stage. The goal is to perform your act on Broadway, but first, they must travel across the country, taking on opposing puppets at each stop!

Touting a vibrant artistic style, Battle of Puppets combines beautiful graphics, the hallowed art of puppetry, and ruthless combat! Players select and perform their opera in a series of 22 American theatres, each with its own custom backdrop of famous landmarks. Each competition then lets the puppeteer strategically build units, upgrade their castle and outposts, and even cast spells using written gestures to destroy the opposing forces and win the affection of the crowd.

Each of the 5 operas vary significantly in terms of relative strengths and weaknesses, unit types, building speeds, and most interestingly, how they are affected by changing weather conditions. Choosing the best route across the country based on weather patterns is just one of the compelling strategic decisions players make in Battle of Puppets!

There are also 6 professions and an extra race to unlock as the campaigns progress! Professions let players perform magic to sway the course of battle on stage, and are activated by executing unique gestures. Learn to repair your troops, mind control the enemy, boo the opposition, and more! Also, use the unlockable race to take on the hard mode campaign.

Features:

Maps:
• 22 unique locations, each with changing backdrops for day and night.

Armies:
• play as any of the 5 different armies, each representing famous operas.
• 20 distinctive unit types

Modes:
• 3 game-play modes
• Battleground – destroy the enemy castle
• Survival – stay alive!
• Fast Battleground – destroy the enemy fast
• 3 difficulty levels
• 3 distict user profiles

Professions:
• 6 unlockable professions let players cast magic on the enemy

Climate:
• Multiple climates that affect your troops in battle

Languages
• English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Japanese and French.

And a gameplay video:

VERY cool game, I love the concept of it. We’ll try to get a review up as soon as we can get our hands on it!

Hotel Mogul is a hotel-centric time-management game from Alawar Games.

Have you ever wanted to dabble in real estate? Don’t have the cash or knowledge to get licensed and start flipping properties? Well, Hotel Mogul could be a pretty fun alternative that will only cost you pocket change. What’s the situation? Well, you’re working for a woman who quickly gets pushed out of her company for no real reason other than having a real lack of fashion sense. Your goal is to build her an empire so she can feel better about herself. Alright, that really isn’t the story behind it, but what I just made up was a lot more entertaining for me!

Work faster, faster!

In reality, you’re learning the ins and outs of hotel management – on a very high level. You don’t have to worry about the little details of the hotels, just build ‘em, monetize ‘em, sell ‘em, and complete any objectives you may have for the level. You progress through the different levels, unlocking all kinds of different buildings you can buy that have different capacities or values. There are two kinds of buildings: hotels, and decorative. Hotels are pretty self explanatory, and decorative should be too, but they also add specific bonuses to the buildings in the radii specified by the description. For example, building a statue in between two hotels will increase the income for those hotels by 40%, which is a godsend in the long run.

You will have objectives for every level, they can be as simple as “Build a three star hotel” and they are not very difficult to accomplish, but the real challenge is doing them within the “Expert” time frame, which gives you additional points! These points can then be used to purchase additional hotels, decorations, services, and features for your empire. The sheer variety of buildings and whatever else you can build is simply mind boggling, and adds a certain level of depth to the game that I thoroughly enjoyed. I am sure that later in the game, you will have to use a combination of those decorations and buildings to achieve the income goals you will be needing for the objectives.

Don't tell me I'm not an expert, damnit let me try again!

The graphics are simple – sprites that are well drawn and have a great level of detail on them. There isn’t very much animation but what little there is is very smooth and pleasant to the eyes. No complaints whatsoever on the graphics, and there are even little animated shorts in between! The sound is simple as well, little dings and dongs go off every now and then letting you know when certain events are happening – like when you have money, or when you can collect your money.

Overall, the game plays very well – the mechanics are smooth and flow very well together, the concept is great for time-management game lovers like myself, and the game is very well polished. On the flip side, the game didn’t blow me away and there is plenty of room for improvement, better than average I would say.

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
Hotel Mogul is a solid game - well designed and executed, and definitely a must have for lovers of time-management games. An above average, quality game, but nothing will blow you away.

Screenshots

Fleeced! – Shear Terror is an action strategy game from Bight Games.

You and your brother are in a feud – you have walled yourselves off with a llama in order to protect yourself from “llama fur banditos” (Made that name up myself!) who just want to get into your secret garden and shave your poor llama. On top of that, your brother is firing cannon balls at you and your wall in order to make your llama naked first, but that isn’t happening on your watch! Oh no, you’re going to build cannons faster, stronger, and better than what he has, and you’re going to shoot the crap out of his walls faster than he can repair it!

You're damn right it's on.

Well, that’s the plan anyway. The name of the game is simple: protect your llama from that big burly bandito, make your brother’s llama vulnerable, and repair your walls in a bid to have the last llama standing. You will have four cannons at your disposal: a regular cannon, a double cannon, a buckshot cannon, and a cannon so big that I have to call it the BFG. Each cannon has its distinct advantages and strengths, those which mostly consist of being able to blow up walls and make your brother fall flat on his bum and make him look a fool. You can upgrade your cannons to upgrade their strength – which actually makes a pretty big difference!

So those cannons do have a pretty single minded purpose – blow up walls. Those walls however – starting with hay walls – can be repaired as long as you run up to it and hit the repair button. You can also upgrade the walls to strengthen them and make your repair jobs less frequent and necessary.

BOOM BABY!

I do have a confession to make however – I never once upgraded my wall. Alright well, I upgraded my hay walls to wooden walls during one of the stages, but I was actually trying to repair them and I ended up upgrading them by accident. Why did I never upgrade my walls? Well, I developed a strategy for the game where I was able to make the banditos shear my brother’s llama prett much consecutively – thereby winning the game for me almost instantaneously. It’s cheap, but who needs defense when your offense is impeccable?

Fleeced! is a very awesome game. The story itself is short, which could be bad, but I had a blast playing through it. All of the dialogue in between stages was great, even including a reference to a certain Black Eyed Peas song that I will leave up to you to discover. (Boom boom boom. Oops.) The game mechanics themselves are brilliant – simple joystick-like movement controls with your left thumb and an array of buttons for your right thumb, and you tilt the device to aim your cannon shots. One of my beefs with the controls is that, should you ever get an OpenFeint achievement, you’re going to be rendered useless in the short time that the achievements appear on screen because you can’t seem to use the controls at the same time! Not really a huge issue – except that one time where I was running to repair a damaged wall and I happened to get an achievement, so I stood there looking braindead while one of those banditos managed to break their way into my pen and shear my poor llama!

Keep laughing it up fatso, I've got my cannon pointed at your gut for next time!

Graphically, the game is alright – decent quality (for the iPhone) 3D graphics that were very smooth on my iPhone 3GS, as well as great drawing for the characters in between stages. The music and sounds are also great. There was also a multiplayer arcade option for up to two players, but as of this writing I couldn’t seem to connect to the Internet option, but in the meantime, you can still play it over wifi and bluetooth. Blow up your friends’ walls and make them suffer!

Overall, I completely loved Fleeced! – Shear Terror. I loved it so much that I just recommended a bunch of my friends buy it so that I can wreck their faces in this game, taunt them, and then wreck their faces again. I feel ashamed that I am so addicted to this game – but then it does center around llamas, so I think that balances everything out. A game this polished and fun only deserves one thing from us – a Golden Tap!

Score

MustTap Score: Golden Tap

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

Bottom Line
Fleeced! - Shear Terror is just addictive. Better than a drug, and you can get your daily dosage of llamas while you are at it. In fact, you hate llamas if you don't play this game. Fast-paced action strategy game that will keep you playing for hours!

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

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

Worms is the first foray into the mobile phone scene for the much beloved series by Team 17.

The Game

Ah… air raids.

Team 17’s Worms series has been around for nearly fifteen years, and it’s quirky, charming, endlessly replayable turn-based multiplayer gameplay has established a large following. This following, however, has been dwindling over the years with a lack of major releases and a foray into the 3D realm that didn’t go so well. Recent releases on XBLA, DS, and PSP have shown that Team 17 still knows how to treat their wiggly rascals, and an iPhone iteration was an absolute no-brainer for the portable market. As such, July 2009 saw the release of Worms for the iPhone, and with it came all of the cursing, drowning, and holy hand grenades that the series is famous for.

The game stays true to the form of classic Worms games. Teams of several worms are placed on a randomly generated map with themes ranging from lava pits to tropical islands. These teams take turns moving one worm at a time in order to destroy the opposing team using a wide variety of weapons and strategies. Weapons range from shotguns, dynamite, hadokens, missile launchers, air-raids, and terrain traversing equipment such as ropes, jetpacks, and teleporters. The selection of weapons is as large as the latest releases in the franchise, which was a nice surprise.

The arsenal of a worm.

Turns consist of three phases: position your worm, fire your weapon of choice, and retreat your worm, with each phase being timed. The primary weapons for use need to be aimed, and most weapons can be charged. The longer you charge a missile, the farther it will go, etc. When aiming and charging, wind also has to be taken into account, so something as simple as firing a single missile to a Worm on the cliff below you can prove to be quite difficult if you’re not good with angles. Think of it as playing a golf game, but instead of sinking a ball in a hole, you’re lining your shots to sink worms in the ocean, which, I might add, is incredibly satisfying.

The big question with the iPhone version of Worms, and any game for that matter, is how the controls work. This issue will present itself rather prominently when the realization hits that the controls really make the player feel like a worm themselves. Controls are slow and inaccurate, which is a real shame considering how precise attacks need to be to do well on the battlefield. Aiming reticules have to be dragged, but don’t move fast enough to accommodate for the ticking clocks that wind down for each turn. Camera movement is just as slow, and due to the size of the screen, lots of movement is requirement to get a good scope of what you’re doing. These two issues wouldn’t be a nuisance if the game simply froze the clock doing these processes, but unfortunately things aren’t that forgiving.

Worm movement is incredibly frustrating and unresponsive, as well. For example, in order to leap forward, a single tap on the worm is necessary. To do the high backflip, though, you must double-tap the worm. I often found myself leaping straight into a mine or plummeting to my doom due to the game not recognizing my double-taps. I don’t consider myself a Worms pro, but I know how to get the job done well enough, but doing so on the iPhone is a struggle that almost became too frustrating to bear.

This is not somewhere your worm wants to be.

Graphics

While seeing worms explode and drown on your iPhone screen is definitely exciting, the heavily pixelated worms, plain backgrounds, and constant attention to the view of the landscape make things hard on the eyes at times. Worms was never known for great visuals, as it doesn’t need them, but not even being able to stay on par with the DS iterations is inexcusable.

Sound

My personal favorite aspect of the series also managed to remain intact: the witty banter of the Worms. During warfare, Worms will make remarks, sass, yell with patriotic passion, and scream with more grief than a teenage girl in a horror movie. Not only that, but dozens of languages and accents can be chosen for your team (I’m quite partial to the Scottish setting). This dialogue is complimented by comical sound effects stemming from the large amounts of explosions, nudges, and drownings going on – all of which sound great. Music, however, is quite lacking, but the soft, albeit forgettable tunes don’t take away from the experience due to the fantastic sound effects and dialogue. It would’ve been nice to be able to decimate my enemies to my favorite song, though.

Additional Comments

While the core aspects of the franchise are intact, one major piece of the puzzle is mysteriously missing from the experience: multiplayer. Worms has always been popular because of it’s addicting online multiplayer. There’s still nothing quite like two to four teams of worms unleashing their weapons and keen strategies on one another to lead their team to victory. It’s obvious that the turn-based gameplay lends itself quite well to easily handled online battles – especially on portables, but Team 17 decided to release the iPhone game with only local multiplayer. Needless to say, passing the phone back and forth between players, and hovering around such a tiny screen to see what happens during a turn isn’t the way Worms multiplayer is supposed to be. This was a major downer for me, and will surely be the number one drawback for most Worms fans. If people can play Pictionary with real-time drawing displayed on the screen for over eight people, why can’t I battle worms online with others as well? One can only hope that a future update will yield this feature. As far as content goes, you’re only getting a bare-bones package here. Standard game types (with some customizable variables for competitive play), local multiplayer, and a short challenge mode are all you’ll be getting in the package.

Customizable teams let you show your individuality… to nobody.

Conclusion

Not much has changed for Worms over the years, but it continuously brings enjoyment and addictive gameplay with each new title. If you’re a die-hard fan, then the $4.99 price tag may be cheap enough to bring you Worms on your phone. That’s the way I felt when it was released, but the catastrophic controls and lack of online multiplayer will likely leave this game on the last page of my home screen for quite some time. It’s playable, but until Team 17 brings us a free online multiplayer update, or a game that doesn’t seem churned out in a month, I’ll stick to controlling my worms in other ways.

Score

MustTap Score: Rusty Tap

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

Bottom Line
A playable port, but the steep learning curve and sluggish controls make this one only suitable for diehard fans. First-timers may want to look to the DS, PSP, or XBLA releases instead.

Screenshots

Star Defense is a 3D tower defense game developed by Rough Cookie and published by ngmoco:).

The Game

You call that an invasion?

The universe is in deep doggy doo – the S’Rath, an evil alien race, is invading planets and wiping out all of the inhabitants. You, the trusty strategist of these gaggle of planets, are given the task of protecting the fleeing inhabitants from being completely wiped out by these S’Rath jerks through the creation of defensive structures that will stop them dead in their tracks. Are you scared yet? Don’t be, because Star Defense is genuinely one of the best tower defense games I have ever played, let alone on the iPhone, and it is so well polished that I could literally see my reflection in the very well detailed models of the game.

In essence, you have four towers at your disposal: machine gun, flamethrower, slow, and lightning. The machine gun has a high rate of fire, but will only deal damage to a single individual enemy. Flamethrowers cause damage over time, slow will slow down your enemies, and lightning causes high damage over an area. There is of course a tower limit depending on the level and difficulty, and they must be spaced out appropriately. These towers can be upgraded to Level 3 towers where they increase in power and range for every level gained, but they are all rather pricey.

Oh… that’s a little better I guess…

As for the game itself, you are going from planet to planet helping the survivors fend off the onrush of S’Rath invaders and each planet increases the number of incoming waves of enemies. By my count, there are at least eight different kinds of S’Rath invaders, ranging from non-factor Probes to slow-resistant Man-O-Wars who will breeze past your machine guns. Once you complete the mission at a specific planet, you can also continue on for Endless mode where you survive as long as possible as the enemies continue to become stronger and stronger.

Star Defense also implements the Plus+ network, the social gaming platform from ngmoco:) that allows you to chat with other players on the network, try to get a score onto the leaderboards, or tackle one of the many achievements available to Star Defense players. This was my first experience with the Plus+ network, and I have to say I was mighty impressed and I look forward to future interactions with it. One of the fun little features that I found was that Star Defense had many challenges available to the user and you could send that challenge to one of your other Plus+ friends, which they could beat for bragging rights.

Graphics

Star Defense has gorgeous graphics – entirely 3D with very detailed sprites that are smoothly animated. In addition, the planets you will be playing on are lush and full of little intricate details that add to the environment. If you are anything like me, you will spend a lot of time rotating and zooming into the planet just to check out all of the different details while checking out the paths that the enemy combatants will be traveling on.

Sound

Welp, I failed.

Star Defense has a great futuristic-style soundtrack in the menu that definitely made you want to kick some alien butt, but once you enter the game, you are given a musical score that is very fitting for the planet. For example, the nature-like planet had a very serene and calm soundtrack with mostly piano, and the ice planet had a very cold and distant feeling soundtrack. Otherwise, the only music you will be hearing is the sounds of your enemies being obliterated – and is it an ever sweet sound.

Conclusion

Star Defense is one of those fantastic games that you definitely will have to buy, a tower defense game that is just so polished, so detailed, and so fun that you will will spend hours battling back hordes of S’Rath invaders just to save the universe. So what are you waiting for, a cape?

Score

MustTap Score: Golden Tap

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

Bottom Line
Star Defense is a special kind of tower defense game; being extremely well polished and quite a bit fun. There are many achievements to attain and the amount of replayability is immense.

Screenshots

Fieldrunners is a strategy/action game developed by Subatomic Studios.

The Game

Rounds can get pretty hectic.

Fieldrunners is a tower defense game. This style of gameplay hearkens back to the Warcraft 3 Custom Maps community before the now-ubiquitous Defense of the Ancients began to make the rounds, and so some players may feel a twinge of nostalgia for the first app from Subatomic Studios. For those not versed in tower defense, or TD as veteran WC3 players have affectionately dubbed it, the objective of the game is to simply defend your base. Instead of shooting at them as a single unit or commanding groups of units to attack enemies, all you are permitted to do in tower defense is to build a variety of stationary towers that react to enemy units in particular ways. Most tower defense games have a diverse set of towers to pick from and an equally varied range of enemies, and the strategy usually lies in building the right towers in the right areas to stop wave after wave of man, robot, or vehicle from destroying your base, which normally sits at the opposite end of the map from the enemies’ spawn point. There may be single or multiple spawn points depending on which of the three maps you are playing.

The main tenets of tower defense are upheld quite well by Fieldrunners. In “Classic” mode, you are able to pick from four towers that fulfill various roles; for example, one tower slows enemies down, and another fires missiles that deal splash damage. Still more kinds of towers are available in the “Extended” and “Endless” modes, the latter of which removes the cap of 100 enemy waves. Each kind of tower costs a different amount of money, and you can build a tower anywhere on the rectangular map, so players will spend a lot of time and lose a few rounds figuring out the optimal configuration of towers. An additional layer of strategy comes in the form of being able to upgrade existing towers instead of building new ones. Once one has discovered the “best” layout of towers for a particular map, the game ends up consisting of watching your iPhone-controlled opponents struggle and fail to get across while you sprinkle upgrades and swap towers here and there.

There are three maps to choose from.

The game is as easy as you make it. On harder difficulty levels, it can be very challenging to micromanage (Yes, I said the “m” word.) your towers to ensure that the next wave of enemies doesn’t slip through a hole in your defenses. “Endless” mode is especially entertaining to try and “beat,” a victory here meaning creating the ultimate defense whose only weakness is your iPhone battery.

The biggest victory that Subatomic Studios’ has scored with Fieldrunners is the game’s controls. A tower defense game might seem daunting to adapt without a keyboard and mouse, but it’s very intuitive to simply drag the towers where you want them. Upgrading towers or selling them back is also very simple: just click the tower in question and tap on the appropriate option. This game could definitely have been rendered unplayable by bad controls, but thankfully this is not the case.

Graphics

The game uses sprites that are easy to distinguish from one another and there is enough variety in terms of locations, even though they all have the same general rectangular layout. The graphical effects can be described as “cartoon violence” more than anything else. Fieldrunners is overall a colorful, aesthetically appeasing game.

Sound

While there is no in-game music to speak of, the sound effects do their job well. Missiles explode on hit, a particularly slimy tower gives a hilariously gooey impression, and there’s nothing sweeter than the sound of multiple gatling guns, flamethrowers and rockets raining down on your targets. None of the sounds get too annoying, but it would have been nice if the enemy helicopters were a bit less noisy.

Conclusion

Fieldrunners is a definite must-buy for tower defense fans because of the expertly adapted touch screen controls, and the variety of stages and difficulty options make it accessible for anyone else. This is definitely one of the most replayable games on the App Store, if only for the appeal of squeezing every last minute out of the “Endless” mode.

Score

MustTap Score: Golden Tap

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

Bottom Line
Fieldrunners is an excellent foray into the tower defense genre on the iPhone OS.

Screenshots

Civilization Revolution is a turn-based strategy game based on the Civilization series by Sid Meier, developed by 2K Games, 2K China, and Firaxis Games.

The Game

They bring a knife, you bring a gun…

For those unfamiliar with the Civilization series, the premise is this: you are the leader of a nation and you will take that nation from the stone ages to the modern era through growth, research, and a little bit of ye olde strongarm. Of course, there is a lot more to it, but occasionally I write as if I am composing a message for Twitter. Anyhow, you as a nation will develop your military, your economy, your technology, and your culture through research, creating buildings, and the exchange of knowledge with other cultures. You will meet these other cultures throughout your playing time, and it is up to you to make peace or go straight for the throat. But of course, they can do the exact same thing right back to you.

Death from above!

Civilization Revolution itself is a turn-based strategy game where you take turns moving units around, settling and building cities, improving your culture and economy, and waging wars. Three of the same unit will create an army, which can allow for a much more powerful, combined attack. Each game of Civilization Revolution has a limited number of turns (Game ends at 2100AD) and the nation with the greatest score at the end of the game automatically wins. Should you choose not to take it to the limit of turns, you can win four different ways: build a spaceship and be the first to make it to Alpha Centauri, capture all of the Capitals of the other nations present, achieve 8 economic milestones, and attract 20 great people (Like Albert Einstein) and build the United Nations wonder. The real challenge is to achieve one of the aforementioned victory conditions before the other nations do.

One of the real problems of the game is that the movement scheme is a bit weird, with the “Go To” option not really being very good. You can click and select anywhere on the screen, but if you have to scroll at all, tough luck moving there. This may not seem like a big deal, but have you ever tried to launch a nuclear ICBM within the same screen? Suicide. In addition, Random Map mode, which just dumps you into a game with four other nations, does not allow you to choose the number of opponents or the size of the map, just the difficulty.

Graphics

You brought a horse to a tank fight?

The art style of Civilization Revolution (and the game itself) reminded me of the Nintendo DS version of Civilization Revolution, but with slightly better graphics. The game is very polished and the animations are somewhat smooth.

Sound

There is no soundtrack present in Civilization Revolution, but there is quite a diverse array of sound effects. Unfortunately, after playing the game for about an hour and a half straight, I had the urge to choke Queen Elizabeth after hearing her conversational sound effect about 300 times.

Additional Comments

One of my favourite aspects of the Civilization series was playing with my friends online and verbally berating their inability to research technology as fast as I could, and I definitely hope to see multiplayer in a future update of Civilization Revolution. Aside from that, the game has immense amounts of replayability, being able to play as one of many leaders and nations, as well as being able to win in a multitude of different possible ways.

Conclusion

Civilization Revolution is a wonderful incarnation of one of my favourite strategy games of all time, on a mobile device. There are some shortcomings present in the game which prevent it from reaching its full potential, but thankfully they can be corrected in the near future.

Score

MustTap Score: Silver Tap

Looks great and gives out some quality stuff!

Bottom Line
As a huge fan of the Civilization series, I was absolutely in love with the game. Being the first touch version I had played, it could have certainly been much better with the controls and customization, but the presentation of information and overall feeling of the game was superb.

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Summation is a number-centric game developed by JetFable Studio.

The Game

Feels like the Matrix.

Summation is a very simple game that becomes very difficult, very quickly. You drop number tiles next to other tiles in a bid to achieve the goal of the round through the collective sums of adjacent tiles. Basically, you make the numbers add up to the goal of the round, with tiles above and to the sides. If the game were just this, I would have had no trouble getting onto the leaderboards. Of course, there are things in your way. A round is essentially a finite number of moves – every time you drop a tile, you lose a star at the bottom of the screen, and the round is over when the stars are gone. The goal of every round increases incrementally as the rounds go on, and number tiles of greater value are introduced.

Combos are also a strategic part of Summation, as they provide score multipliers and score the most that you possibly can. The score is important in Summation mostly for the competitive aspect, you can go for as many rounds possible, but your score may not be as high as others who used combos effectively. Of course, you will be reminded of this when the person on the leaderboard who beat you did it in much less rounds than you played. Pwned. Summation might feel a bit slow at times, when you are sitting there brainstorming moves that will benefit you the most, but what can you really do.

Graphics

Summation doesn’t have the best graphics in the world, nor should it, because it is just a numbers game. What I really liked about the art behind Summation is that it uses a chalkboard theme, which is great for the brainy-feel of the game, but is not a huge benefit for the game personally. Decent graphics overall, could definitely use more polish.

Sound

How can Ace be one AND eleven?

Summation has a cute little soundtrack in the main menu that is upbeat and very cheerful, but unfortunately goes away once you start playing the game. In the actual game, there are little sound effects here and there, but nothing substantial.

Additional Comments

Summation does get a little boring after a while, especially after progressing through round after round of numbers. Thankfully, it is very easy to play Summation casually, but I do wish there were more variety in terms of play modes.

Conclusion

Numbers are always a fun thing to play with and Summation definitely a great numbers fix. Unfortunately, the game does get boring and it could really use more play modes. Number lovers will enjoy it, and everyone else should definitely check it out!

Score

MustTap Score: Iron Tap

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

Bottom Line
Numerically minded people will enjoy Summation, strategy and tactics are required in order to score high and continue playing. Summation is a bit slow and would be better with a greater variety of modes, definitely worth checking out.

Screenshots