Tag: game of the week

I’m a simple man. Give me an old-school first-person dungeon crawler and I’m a pretty happy guy. Make one centered around rescuing a cat and, oh boy, now you’re really speaking my language. Throw in a really unique touchscreen control scheme that I’ve never seen in a game of this type before and we’ve got a winner winner chicken-that-you-found-in-a-barrel dinner. That accurately describes Labyrinth: The Wizard’s Cat from developer ZombiSoft, who appears to be just a single person named Anders Gustavsson. There are some rough edges here, and some negative things to note, but by and large I’m just having a super good time with Labyrinth: The Wizard’s Cat and I’m excited to see where it takes me.

So as the story goes, you’re an apprentice wizard who is tasked with finding the runaway cat of your mentor wizard, and you graduating to become a full-blown wizard hinges on you completing this mission. Just when you think you’ve cornered the adorable little feline you find yourself transported to a dungeon labyrinth filled with traps and enemies. You also spot the kitty roaming around and so your mission now becomes more difficult as you try to make your way through this dungeon alive as well as rescue your boss’s pesky little cat.

Now, Labyrinth: The Wizard’s Cat isn’t a highly complex game by any means. There’s some light RPG elements in the form of leveling up and finding cool new weapons and gear, but there’s no party system or any extensive character progression. It reminds me a lot of Questlord in that it’s a pretty simple affair mechanically but the story, the visuals, and the personality of the game compel you to keep moving forward. Also, just because this game is bright and colorful and has a fairly straightforward design don’t think it’s some pushover. The game actually gets rather difficult rather quickly, but thankfully you can save anytime and anywhere, which is something you should practice doing often.

The really neat feature here is the control scheme. You can choose between virtual arrows or swipe gestures for directional movement, which is pretty par for the course. But if you lay a second thumb down on the screen you can free look in any direction. It takes a little getting used to but the swipe gesture movement coupled with the free look gesture combines to make for a very satisfying touchscreen control scheme. It almost feels like you’re playing a first-person shooter at times, once you get comfortable and start zipping around to and fro, but you’re actually still playing a game with grid-based movement.

My small nitpicks are that I really wish this game had an option to play in portrait, and the swipe detection for movement is a bit finicky. It recognizes short, fast swipes as opposed to longer ones, and before I figured that out I was having a really frustrating time thinking the game wasn’t detecting my inputs. Probably something that can be smoothed out in an update. Overall though, despite being a bit basic overall and having some rough edges, Labyrinth: The Wizard’s Cat is a very enjoyable retro dungeon crawler, which is something we don’t get too many of nowadays. If that’s not worth a couple of bucks then I’m not sure what is.

Well this is a weird one for a couple of different reasons. First, Suika Game isn’t exactly new. It launched on the Nintendo Switch in Japan way back in 2021, but some prominent game streamers discovered it last year and caused it to go viral in that country, and it fairly quickly found its way to the North American eShop. A mobile version seemed like a no-brainer given the gameplay, and this past January an official iOS version launched in Japan. Quietly at the beginning of this month that iOS version was updated with English language support and pushed out to more countries, but it wasn’t until this past week that we were made aware of this. I guess we’re not exactly on the cutting edge, are we?

Besides not technically being a “new” release Suika Game is also kind of an odd pick for a Game of the Week because it was only last month that we chose Galaxy Mix as our Game of the Week, a game that was openly and proudly inspired by Suika Game and did its darndest to put its own unique twists on the “merging large spherical-shaped objects” formula. Indeed, Galaxy Mix is excellent, and does have a handful of cool features that are not present in Suika Game proper. However, as someone who didn’t play the original on Switch or in its somewhat janky web-based form, this week has been my first experience with the real-deal Suika Game, and I’ve got to say… I think I like it more.

There’s just something different about the physics of Suika Game compared to Galaxy Mix and similar titles. It’s very hard to explain but having been jumping back and forth between the two games all week, comparing and contrasting, they are most definitely quite different from one another in terms of feel. And while the power-ups and combo scoring in Galaxy Mix are neat features that do differentiate it, I’m feeling more drawn to the purity of Suika Game. This is a no-frills high-score chaser, and the lack of combos means I’m not accidentally creating a sticky situation for myself trying to build up a huge chain reaction, and no power-ups keeps my focus squarely on the space management of the jar and not hoping in the back of my mind that I’ll get bailed out of that sticky situation thanks to a lucky power-up.

On the flip side, it’s only fair to point out what I think Galaxy Mix does better than in Suika Game. Namely this has to do with controls. Galaxy Mix has a relative touch scheme, meaning you can drag anywhere on the screen to move your little aimer line. This is nice if you want to move your hand out of the way to see what’s going on and then make a move. In Suika Game the aimer line snaps to wherever you touch on the screen, so on more than one occasion I’ve found myself taking my thumb off the screen to plan my next move and then having the aimer snap to a location I wasn’t expecting when I put my thumb back to make that move, thus dropping a fruit somewhere I wasn’t intending to. This can REALLY screw up a game, but it’s a pretty minor nitpick and I’m starting to get used to it. Still, a relative touch option would be most welcome.

A cool option in Suika Game that’s not in Galaxy Mix is the ability to play in landscape if you want. This somewhat addresses the issue I mention above since in landscape you control the game with virtual buttons, either movement arrows and a drop button flanking either side of the play area or all controls on either the left or right side of the play area for ambidextrous one-handed landscape play. Obviously the game is inherently suited to portrait orientation given the shape of the play area, and you’d have to be a borderline psychopath to WANT to play in landscape mode, but I appreciate that the option is there for all the sickos out there. I kid, I kid.

I really do think the two games are different enough that they’ll both find a permanent spot on my phone for the foreseeable future, but after binging on Galaxy Mix for a month straight and kind of burning myself out, Suika Game is offering a nice change of pace while still having that “one more go” gameplay that’s easy to pick up and play but hard to put away. Gosh, that was like every mobile game cliche in one sentence, but I stand by it. If you’re a Galaxy Mix fan I think it’s worth the few bucks to see what the OG is all about, and if you’re a Suika Game hardcore then it’s well worth plopping a buck down to see what the competition brings to the table. One thing’s for sure, we’re well-served in the “merging large spherical-shaped objects” genre on mobile and I ain’t complaining. Finally, this piece was heavily a comparison between two specific games since that is the perspective I was coming from personally, but for a more general look at Suika Game on its own check out our review and maybe even learn a thing or two with our tips and tricks guide.

For me Hexage is one of those developers that harkens back to the early days of the App Store and really the beginnings of iPhone gaming. I have spent many collective hours playing the likes of Totemo, Radiant, Radiant Defense, EVAC, Reaper… the list goes on. So I was delighted to see another new game from Hexage launch this week called Flying Tank, and even more delighted that this is yet another seriously good game from this developer.

This is a horizontal scrolling shooter that takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting where aliens have arrived on Earth and humanity decided to greet them peacefully. The massive aliens just kind of hung out in the sky doing their own thing, and humans just kind of kept doing their own thing as well. Slowly though, the aliens began consuming the planet’s resources and taking over, and since the humans lived alongside them for so long they weren’t really well-equipped to fight them off.

Their solution was to just… nuke the whole planet, basically. And let me tell you, that did NOT go as planned. The aliens still ruled supreme, humanity was almost completely wiped out in the process, and those humans who did survive have splintered off into various factions. You, with your fleet of flying tanks, are sort of a hired goon that blasts away aliens and humans alike across 24 different missions as you try to help reclaim Earth from the aliens.

Controllers are supported in Flying Tank, and the game plays just great with them, but this is also a game that was designed incredibly well for the touchscreen. Default controls have your ship–er, tank–following your finger, but relative touch is available in the options and it’s my preference. You fire your main gun by tapping the screen or holding down to rapid-fire, launch your special weapon with a swipe to the right, and drop a bomb by swiping down. Yes, there are ground enemies in addition to airborne ones. You also have another special ability, typically a shield, mapped to an upward swipe.

The result is an incredibly capable killing machine with complex weapons and defense abilities all mapped to easy to use tap and swipe gestures. It’s so much more fun having full control of your arsenal and being able to make strategic decisions on when and where to fire off your weapons or deploy a special ability, compared to lots of made-for-mobile shooters where your ship just auto-shoots and you just kind of guide it through the game. For lack of a better term this feels like a “real” shooter and not something dumbed down for the sake of the touchscreen.

The combat is a blast and there is no shortage of stuff to customize and upgrade your fleet of flying tanks with, and there are SO MANY awesome and unique weapons and enemies it really stands apart from other shooters. There is a ton of stuff to do in this game, but I’m also finding myself really enjoying the story side of things. Best of all is that Flying Tank is free to download and try with 8 missions available, and if you get through those and like what you see there’s a couple of different options for unlocking the full game depending on if you like extra goodies or not. Personally, I love extra goodies, so I bought the deluxe unlock, but it’s nice there’s a cheaper option too. If you like shooters and premium mobile game experiences you can’t really go wrong with Flying Tank.

Let me start off this write-up with a scolding: Developers, make trailers for your games! Trojuhelnicky is a new game from developer Inputwish, who you may know from their excellent Go Rally, and it kind of sounds like this was the passion side project of one of their programmers. But gosh darn it, I know there is a very specific audience out there who would see this game in action, and hear its bleeps and bloops, and decide they were instantly sold. But unfortunately you’ll just have to check out these screenshots and play bleep and bloop sounds in your head to imagine what Trojuhelnicky is like. It’s worth the effort though, trust me.

Trojuhelnicky simultaneously reminds me of some of the very early types of games we got back with the iPhone was new, as well as an Atari 2600 game if the Atari 2600 was fed a steady diet of hyperbolic steroids and LSD. At its most basic it’s an object avoidance game, where you move your little character at the bottom of the screen back and forth trying to avoid the stuff falling from the top of the screen. Big “first year of iPhone games” energy. A twist is that you want to collect any object that is yellow, as those give you points or power-ups, and then shoot pretty much everything else you see. Except red things, which are impervious to your shots, and must simply be avoided entirely.

That somewhat basic set of rules blends into a high-score chasing masterpiece. The movement of your character, who is just a simple triangle, is immediate and precise, and the action happening onscreen between the objects falling, your bullets being shot, and enemies being hit by those bullets and exploding into a shower of particles is both chaotic and easily recognizable. Trojuhelnicky is a hot mess, a hot glorious mess, but somehow it’s totally manageable. I never once felt like I died because the action wasn’t clear, every death has been entirely my fault. And I have died A LOT.

The basic structure of Trojuhelnicky is that you’ll play for a bit, a meter fills up, and then you move onto the next level. The levels can apparently go on forever, and your ultimate goal is to end up with a score that will land you on the global leaderboards. There’s not really much more to it than that. This is a very simple game, executed very well on a fundamental level. Maybe some extra modes or options or features might add to the experience, and I kind of think you could take out the whole “moving to the next level” part and make it just one continuous endless level. But if a pure arcade game is something you can appreciate, especially one that is so easy to pick up and have be immediately enjoyable, Trojuhelnicky is pretty tough to beat.

I remember when Reigns first came out back in 2016 and it kind of blew everyone’s mind that someone would take the simplistic binary left/right swiping of Tinder and create an entire game around it. I mean, so many games are just a series of yes and no choices anyway, and the actual motion of swiping left or right on your phone’s screen is weirdly satisfying, so it makes a lot of sense that it all came together to create a phenomenal mobile game. But… what about up and down? Are we so cruel as to forget two of the cardinal directions!? I’m left wondering if that was the inspiration for Veralomna’s Cardara!

In Cardara! you’ll start a journey amongst a vast grid of cards all laying face down. You can swipe left or right to move to either of the cards next to you, or–finally!–you can move up or down to move to those cards too. Under the cards you’ll find all sorts of things that you might find in your typical roguelike or RPG. Chief among those are enemies, but there are also special cards that grant you unique abilities or equipment, or other types of cards that can alter the game in some way. But mostly it’s enemies. Battling is automatic, and if you move to a card and encounter an enemy you’ll take turns whacking each other until one of you has no HP left. Hopefully it’s the other guy.

The cards surrounding you are not typically revealed until you move to them, which makes Cardara! feel almost like a gigantic game of Minesweeper mixed with a roguelike. Also, like Reigns, and like many roguelike games, the end can come fiercely out of nowhere even if it seems like things are really going great for you. Dying a lot is all part of the fun, and Cardara! has a really neat ForestPass system (don’t call it a BattlePass) that gives you tons of carrots on sticks to chase after and helps you feel like even the quickest of deaths still counted for something. There’s also a massive store where you can buy all sorts of upgrades for your character, making each new run feel maybe just a bit more promising than the last.

If a not-BattlePass and in-game store sound scary to you, don’t worry, Cardara! is a paid game with no IAP. All that progression and upgrading need to be done the old-fashioned way, by actually playing the game over and over. It’s a great concept. I’m surprised that it’s taken this long for somebody to open up the Y-axis to an adventure with Reigns-like controls, and I’m equally surprised at just how compelling those additional directions can make a game like Cardara! Easily worth the few measly bucks its asking for and an absolutely perfect fit for a mobile game.

I am bananas for hand-drawn and animated graphics in games, particularly ones that feature a bunch of silly or weird characters and a very “homemade art project” presentation, if that makes sense. Games like Hidden Folks and Krispee Street are ones that immediately come to mind. Well I have another painfully charming and adorable game to add to that list and it’s Studio Folly’s new word game Gubbins. What the heck’s a Gubbin? Well, mechanically they are an assortment of modifiers that can both help and hinder your pursuits while playing the word-making portion of Gubbins.

But a “gameplay modifier” just sounds so boring, so Studio Folly decided to dress up each of these modifiers as a different wacky character. If you are old like me and remember the game show Press Your Luck, the Gubbins are sort of a sibling to the Whammy. You’ll just be going about your business, trying to make words on the game board using a pile of single letters or letter chunks at the bottom of the screen, and then BAM out of nowhere a no good Gubbin will come along and do something to mess up your meticulously planned-out word that you were trying to create. Dang you, Gubbin!

Thankfully there are good Gubbins too that can kind of counteract the bad ones messing with you by offering up some very very helpful abilities. This might be giving you a free letter of your choosing to add to the board or even letting you take letters down from the board and add them back to your usable pile. Whatever the case, it feels like every time there’s a Gubbin trying to screw you over there’s another Gubbin showing up to help you do something amazing that you wouldn’t have been able to do on your own. It’s like the Yin and Yang of the Gubbins world.

It helps that the base word game the entirety of Gubbins is built around is also really solid. As I said before you have a stack of letter cards at the bottom, sometimes single letters and sometimes chunks of multiple letters on one card. Drag them onto the play field to create words, both horizontally and vertically. Using a card from the stack at the bottom will then reveal one of the letter cards below, so there’s sort of a “hope and a prayer” factor that goes into playing, as often I’ll be setting up a word that I don’t technically have all the right letters for yet, but… surely it’ll show up as I draw more cards, right? Right!? This might explain why I’m always losing at poker. I’m a river chaser through and through.

Gubbins is free to play the classic mode as much as you like, and there’s a few different IAP options to unlock more modes and Gubbin types and other neat decorations. Right now the bundle to just buy everything and make the game entirely premium is ten bucks, and if you like playing the free portion I think that’s the way to go. Really though, you’re paying for those sweet, sweet Gubbins and their gosh darn adorable personalities. The way they are animated, the sounds they make, their wacky designs, and of course the way they playfully pop in to completely screw over your game that was going so well up to that point. It’s very endearing, and… maddening! I do enjoy it though so if you dig word games don’t let Gubbins pass you by.

I know this is the Game of the Week, but I might dial things back a bit and declare it the Charming As All Get Out Digital Toy But Also Kind of a Game of the Week just for this week only. Or maybe some future weeks too, I don’t know. The point is that if you’re looking for something that will test your gamer skillz to the max then Grab The Apple from Korigame is probably not going to scratch that particular itch, but if you are looking for something that will put a smile on your face while you have a blast fiddling around with it then this is your lucky week.

So Korigame is no stranger to mobile, and their particular niche is games that are cute and silly and lighthearted while also typically being well-suited to a touchscreen. kORi Walk is the first game I can recall really taking a liking to from this developer quite a few years ago now, but really you can pick any of their games out and know you’ll be in for a wholesome and very silly good time, especially if you have kids. Grab The Apple does not stray from this formula and, as someone with a 2-year old and a 4-year old, as well as being a big kid myself, it has been a big hit around my house this past week.

The concept is pretty simple. Your character, of which there are several to choose from, is at the bottom of the screen and there’s an apple hiding on every level typically surrounded by all sorts of dangers traps and blockades. Drag on the screen to extend your seemingly never-ending arm and negotiate all the danger to find a safe path to grab that apple, just as the title suggests, and then watch as your arm retracts like a vacuum cord hauling that apple back to you. It’s relative touch so you can touch anywhere and the hand will mimic your motions, so you’re never blocking your view. And as mentioned the arm seems to never end so feel free to go off course, take the long route, draw some squiggles or whatever on your way to grabbing that apple, I can assure you it’ll bring a smile to your face.

That’s part of the reason I mention this is more of a digital toy, but also because I don’t really see a way to fail a level. You can run into any hazards and it’ll simply cause your arm to retract and you’ll have to try again. Maybe I just haven’t found the fail state yet, or maybe there just isn’t one. There are a few puzzle-y elements by way of hidden walls and such, but I have yet to really be tested on any of the game’s levels. This is all fine, by the way, because I’m enjoying the experience all the same, but it’s worth noting. But hey, just try it out for yourself, as this is a free game with ads and a simple one-time IAP if you wish to remove them, which I very quickly did myself.

So often we view things we grew up loving through rose-colored glasses, and upon revisiting them later in life end up soiling those good memories we once had. This is especially true when talking about video games. There are games I adored as a kid that I couldn’t wait to fire up and re-experience as an adult, only to have a cold bucket of water thrown in my face when I realized that the gameplay just didn’t hold up in the gaming world of today. Video games have had multiple decades of refinement and so much of what we cherish from the ’80s and ’90s “glory days” of video games just hasn’t aged well at all. Sometimes things are just better left as great memories.

One particular genre I’ve had a hankering to go back to over the years but have held back on for fear of exactly what I describe above are the classic point-and-click adventure games from the likes of LucasArts or Sierra On-Line. I absolutely adored the King’s Quest, Space Quest, Monkey Island games and more, but they are also from a time where I could bang my head against a particularly obtuse puzzle for 8 straight hours without ruining the entire rest of my week. Now with my middle-age status, a full time job, two young kids, a wife, and a mortgage to worry about, I’m lucky if I get 8 hours a week in total to dedicate to any sort of gaming, let alone one single puzzle in one single game. No sir, I am downright frightened to try and play through any of those games again.

There is one silver lining to this, however. Sometimes the minds behind those classics you loved as a kid are still kicking around making games, and sometimes they make a brand new game in a series you loved that features modern sensibilities and takes into account you might be an adult with responsibilities and stuff. Such is the case with Ron Gilbert, creator of the Monkey Island series, who had a major part in the original two games but was pretty hands-off with anything that has come out in the series since. He had always dreamed of making a direct follow-up to 1991’s Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, and in recent years that finally happened in the form of Return to Monkey Island which hit consoles and PC last year and arrived on iOS and Android this very week.

What I love about Return to Monkey Island is that it’s like playing one of those classic adventure games as you remember it, not as they actually are. There are quality of life improvements and features here that you would expect from a game made today and that weren’t common in the games from 30+ years ago. That includes a well-designed hint system so that there can still be the insanely obtuse or absurd puzzle solution but you won’t need to seek out a FAQ.txt or log into Usenet to try and find help solving it. The help is there if and only if you want it. Another thing that remains is the offbeat humor the Monkey Island games are known for, thanks to many of the same key players from the early games in the series returning for this sequel. You can find even more information about this game in our review from earlier this week.

While Return to Monkey Island is its own standalone story and doesn’t require that you’ve played any previous games to enjoy, there is certainly plenty of fan service for anyone who did, and it makes me extra sad that we lost the relatively great iOS versions of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2 Special Editions some years back. Being able to play those enhanced ports of the first two games in the series, and then this decades-in-the-making sequel, all on the touchscreen that feels so at home for adventure games, would have been a treat. Alas a boy can dream, and perhaps someday those original games will return, but for now I’m enjoying feeling like a kid again with Return to Monkey Island and if you have fond memories of the series or are completely new but just love classic-style adventure games with incredible production values, you’ll likely enjoy this one too.

I can’t say for sure that it was the first one to do it, but I can say that my own personal first experience with the “merge” genre was Spry Fox’s Triple Town way back in 2012 when the popular web-based game hit iOS. This was really an evolution of the tried-and-true match-3 genre as your matches would not simply disappear, but would create an entirely new singular block. Every one of the game’s base block types could be matched into a more advanced tier, with those advanced versions then being matched to create the next tier of block, and so on. This was extremely clever because it added a whole new strategic element to matching games where you weren’t simply trying to make matches to clear board space, but you were needing to focus on where your matches were being made on the board so that the resulting advanced tier block could be positioned in a way to create further matches. You also didn’t want to clog things up in a way that you wouldn’t have enough space to make matches anymore, because once that board filled up and no more matches were possible your game was over.

Oops. I just spent a ton of time basically re-reviewing a more than decade old game. Thankfully everything I just described about Triple Town also applies to Teeny Tiny Town from Short Circuit Studio. This is a new merging game that applies those core mechanics of merge-based city-building with an extremely pleasing aesthetic and a few unique wrinkles. For one, you can bulldoze a square on the board or you can swap one tile on the board with another, two abilities that can be total game changers and are also limited so as not to be abused. There’s also a constant flow of mini-goals to achieve during the game which will reward you with coins or uses of those abilities, and there’s a sort of shop type thing in the game where you can use coins to buy various items to help build out your city. Need that ONE particular tile to make a match and free up valuable space? You might be able to buy it in the shop.

Consumable items and in-game coins probably sound scary, but Teeny Tiny Town is actually a very premium game. It’s free to start with a limited number of moves you can make, and if you run out of moves you can watch an ad to earn some more or just wait for them to reset. If you hate that sort of thing, there’s a few different IAP options to unlock a premium version of the game. One simply gives you unlimited moves, one unlocks an extra title slot, and one unlocks the rest of the game’s map types. Oh, did I forget to mention there’s a slot to “hold” a tile type for later kind of like in Tetris, and that the game features multiple types of maps in varying grid sizes and with varying elevations for even more complex gameplay? Because those things exist too. And you can unlock all 3 premium IAP options for a discounted singular bundle that’s just $2.99.

I probably should have just saved myself some time and said “Just unlock the whole game for 3 bucks” because that’s what you’ll likely want to do after spending just a bit of time with Teeny Tiny Town. This is a seriously good merge game, with seriously good production values, and I’m finding myself getting lost while playing it because time just sort of disappears. Try it out for free, you won’t regret it, and you’ll probably find yourself three bucks poorer before long. Also, the developer Short Circuit Studio is active in our forums and very receptive to feedback, if you can think of something you might like to see in a future version then don’t be shy about sounding off.

This is sort of a weird position to be in with a Game of the Week. I’m enjoying the heck out of this week’s pick and want to recommend it, but at the same time it has some issues that definitely stand out. Also weird, and possibly a first for this column, is that this week’s pick is technically still an Early Access release, which is common on PC but out of the ordinary on mobile. So in that context some of the issues I have with it can be forgiven, since this isn’t even the final finished version of this game. But at the same time, the world of mobile moves so fast are mobile players really going to wait around to see what the final finished version is all about, whenever that day comes?

The whole situation is… complicated, but forget all that because Peglin from Red Nexus Games is enough fun that I just don’t care. Peglin, in simplified terms, is what would happen if Peggle had a baby with a roguelike dungeon crawler, and it’s very much as awesome as that sounds on paper. The game has been in Early Access on PC for a year, and not too long ago some no-good rascal released an unauthorized mobile version on iOS. It was taken down eventually, but due to that incident and to the frequent requests from PC players, Red Nexus decided to focus on porting the Early Access PC version to mobile now rather than wait for the 1.0 release, and thus we have Peglin on iOS and Android this week.

So it’s pretty understandable that we’ve ended up with a not quite “finished” version of Peglin on mobile, and really it feels like the 0.9x version that’s here is a huge step in the right direction in moving towards that version 1.0 release. The core elemnents here are excellent. Levels are fun, battles are surprisingly strategic while still being extremely luck-based, the assortment of weapons and items is unique. All we really need is to see all that fleshed out and polished up a bit. More levels, more enemies, more classes, more weapons. Perhaps some more long-term unlocks or progression systems to keep us coming back, as well as some cool stat-tracking so we can compare and contrast runs with our friends. Stuff like that.

Shortly after the mobile release, for both PC and mobile versions of the game, an update with 2 new classes arrived–the Balladin and the Roundrel–as well as a new boss and a whole boatload of bug fixes. This is important because with that new framework implemented it should be much easier to add new classes down the line, and like I said it feels like going forward Peglin will improve and grow at a much quicker pace than before. However, in the meantime the game can definitely feel a bit one-note despite being a lot of fun. If you’re used to playing something like Vampire Survivors and being showered with unlocks and progressions loops this will feel a bit lacking in those departments.

That said, there is something rather pure about Peglin’s no nonsense “run-and-done” format, and as I keep reiterating, the gameplay itself is super fun. There’s a very strong “one more go” element here, and there are few things more satisfying than getting your butt whooped only to turn things around with some sort of miraculous ping-pong Hail Mary shot that somehow racks up enough damage to turn the tide of battle. Like I said, the core here is strong, but some minor tweaks and additions could really make this a full-blown showstopper. Peglin is free to try with a one-time IAP to unlock the rest of the game, and I definitely recommend at least checking out the free portion to see how you jive with this crazy mashup for yourself.

Hoo boy, is there some baggage associated with this week’s pick. Super Meat Boy Forever from Team Meat has finally arrived on mobile after originally being announced as a mobile title way back in 2014. Or, in reality, this is what evolved from their Super Meat Boy: The Game game that was announced all the way back on April Fool’s Day in 2012. Either way this is a game that has been in the works for a VERY long time, and with the way that Team Meat has derided the App Store and mobile gaming over the past decade-plus, it was easy to feel like this was a game that would never actually see the light of day on mobile. That I am playing Super Meat Boy Forever on my iPhone right now feels like a small miracle for someone who has been following the entire saga since the very beginning.

So with all that I approached Super Meat Boy Forever from kind of a weird place. I had briefly played the game on Switch at PAX back in 2017, but other than that I never checked out the console and PC versions when they launched a couple of years ago. I hadn’t read any reviews or followed the game in any way. I was more or less coming into this one cold, other than the fact that I knew it was an auto-runner and it had been in various stages of development for more than a decade. It turns out that my ignorance was bliss, because Super Meat Boy Forever is shockingly good and it caught me very pleasantly by surprise.

Being that the original Super Meat Boy helped usher in the “masocore” platforming genre, it should not be a surprise that Super Meat Boy Forever is hard hard hard. You will die so so much, but you will respawn nearly instantly and just prior to the spot you perished, so it never feels too frustrating to have to replay a level over and over. Just kidding, it feels SUPER frustrating, but not because of the interface or the flow of the game, but because of the stupid hard level designs.

Those level designs are actually an interesting and polarizing part of Super Meat Boy Forever. The levels in the game are algorithmically generated using more than 7,000 smaller level chunks. Fans of the original game loved its finely-honed level designs that could be played over and over and perfected, and you certainly lose some of that here. Not necessarily in a bad way however, just different. The Super Meat Boy Forever level-chunk levels feel almost like puzzles that need to be solved with insane timing and reactions. It’s fun and certainly challenging but if you’re looking for more of what the first game offered then these might not do it for you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-L4el2ITpI

Gosh, I could kind of go on and on about this one, there is SO much more to talk about, but I should probably leave something to be reviewed. Also this game is somehow just a dollar so honestly just buy it and try it out for yourself. Chances are pretty good you’ll be into it if you’re into super-difficult auto-runners. This is a genre that’s been so overdone on mobile there was a time when the thought of another auto-runner could make me physically ill, but instead Super Meat Boy Forever has arrived at a time when I’m ready for something like this again and I’ve been nothing but surprised and delighted by it so far.

Perhaps it’s fitting this game was announced over a decade ago because it almost feels like a game from that era, and in that sense I’m happy it took so long so I could be enjoying it now rather than having it be lost in the shuffle of similar games back during the genre’s heyday. In other words, it was actually well worth the wait.

It’s hard to believe but we’re just a few months away from the 5-year anniversary of Codebrew Games aka developer Bobby Li launching the original Pocket City in the App Store. A full premium city-building sim is something that was severely lacking on mobile over the years, and that original Pocket City delivered the goods with a wonderful touchscreen interface, gorgeous visuals, and satisfying city building. And no micro-transactions in sight! There was a reason we chose it as our Game of the Week and awarded it 5 stars in our review when it came out, and since that time the original Pocket City is still pretty much the only serious option for those wanting a premium city builder on mobile.

Just because there’s no real competition in that space doesn’t mean that Codebrew have been resting on their laurels though. In the fall of 2020 a sequel was announced, and this time around the entire game would be built in 3D. I was excited by the announcement, but to be honest Pocket City 2 slipped from my mind in the time since, so I was especially taken off guard when a new trailer was released last month and revealed just what was in store for this 3D sequel. The isometric city-building of the first game was retained, but like a magic trick, at any moment you could zoom right into the city you were building to reveal a 3D open world mode where you as the Town Mayor could roam around partaking in activities or completing missions.

To say that this feature blew my mind would be an understatement. I’d been playing open world games for more than two decades, and playing city builders for closer to three, and it never occurred to me how awesome it would be to design and build your own city AND THEN actually explore the entire thing on foot or by vehicle. This is like a peanut butter and chocolate moment that was just begging to be explored, and so now we have that on mobile with the release of Pocket City 2 this week. I guess the big question is does this ability to roam your own city open world-style add anything to the experience, or is it just a pretty gimmick?

At the risk of teasing, I think I’ll let that question be answered by our pal Mikhail in his full review of Pocket City 2, coming to your eyeballs soon. What I will say though is that the open world feature can be as much of the game as you want it to be, meaning it’s totally possible to just ignore it altogether if you want and just play through Pocket City 2 like a normal isometric city builder. In fact that’s pretty much how I play about 80% of the time, mostly because there’s just so much to be building and managing and monitoring that I don’t really have time to think about “Oh I’m going to go shoot hoops at the park I just built!” or “Oh I’m going to go stop some random muggings on the street!” I love that those options are there, and I think once I get further into my city where it doesn’t need so much micromanaging I’ll probably explore them more.

For now though, Pocket City 2 is exactly what fans of the original game could hope for. It’s bigger and better in pretty much every way just on its city-building mechanics, with the extra open world stuff being like icing on the cake. This is maybe not the most in-depth city builder when it comes to strategy, but it makes up for it in sheer fun and approachability. You can still change between landscape or portrait on the fly, and Pocket City 2 retains that wonderful quality from the original where it’s easy to play for just a few moments at a time or for long stretches. A lot of sim games wouldn’t have that sort of pick up and play nature but it works perfectly for Pocket City 2 as a mobile game.

If you enjoyed the original, I think it’s a no-brainer to pick up this sequel. It seems so far to be better in every way. If you missed out on the first game, it’s safe to just skip it I think and dive right into Pocket City 2 instead. For a mere five dollars you are getting a lot of game here, and I suspect there will still be no real contenders to take its crown as the best premium mobile city builder until the inevitable Pocket City 3 comes along someday in the future. Also, for even more insight about Pocket City 2 and its development, be sure to check out our interview with Codebrew Games from earlier this week and keep your eye out for our review of the game soon.

We’re used to seeing games from other platforms make their way to mobile devices, be it from PC, or console, or of course other handhelds. However, I think this might mark the first time a Playdate game has made the jump to iOS. Scenic Route Software is no stranger to either platform, and they’ve had their hands all up in the Playdate cookie jar since pretty much the beginning. They first adapted their 2015 iOS puzzler Shift for the Playdate before going on and creating a number of the more enjoyable games on the platform, including the very well-received Generations. Now things are coming full circle as Secret Route has rejiggered Generations slightly and brought it to iOS.

I’m not going to lie: Generations is kind of tricky to describe. It’s probably most similar to something like Triple Town. You have a living room wall with a 6×3 grid, and one by one you’ll be given portraits of family members in various age groups. Place 3 or more of the same age group adjacent to each other and they’ll combine into a single portrait one age group higher. Continue this pattern until you finally age out the oldest age group, aka they die. Hey, it happens to all of us. Aging out gives you a huge bonus and ages up everyone on your board, and the game continues on until you’re unable to place any matches and the board fills up.

There’s also a “save” spot on the coffee table where you can place a portrait you don’t want to place on the board just yet, but you don’t want to park stuff on there for too long because bonus items and portraits can also appear there when it’s empty and those can come in handy big time. Another wrinkle to the mechanics is that you can only place portraits on “open” tiles on the grid, which are tiles adjacent to portraits you’ve already placed. Board management in games like this is already a major strategic factor and this just makes it so you have to be even more careful about where you place your pieces. Oh! I almost forgot the most important part about Generations: There is a cat named Poe that lives in the house and you can pet it.

I can honestly see why this was such a big hit on Playdate, and now that Generations is on iOS it has the potential to reach a much larger audience, which it totally deserves to do. I’m not kidding when I say I’ll hold this one up to the greats of the genre such as the aforementioned Triple Town or Threes! or High Rise – A Puzzle Cityscape. I think my only wish is that it played in portrait orientation as this would be a killer one-handed game. That aside, I can’t really find fault with Generations, and based on how quickly I’ve been firing up a new game once the previous one ends I think this is one of those puzzlers where it’ll feel like you’ll always have room to improve or find new strategies. All that for a fiver AND you get to pet the cat? What’s not to love?

I was oddly intrigued when I first heard about developer Timbo Jimbo’s Static Shift Racing last week. The premise was that it’s an open-world street racing game with a heavy ’90s vibe in terms of vehicles and style, and there’s a huge emphasis on customization with thousands of parts and upgrades so every racer can trick out their own ride just to their liking. It sounded massively ambitious for what seemed like a pretty tiny studio, so I kind of figured it would either be a huge success or a major flop when it finally released.

Well, Static Shift Racing did launch globally this week and I’m happy to say it falls way more on the side of a success. Don’t get me wrong, there is a long ways to go in many respects, but what is here at launch is majorly impressive, and more importantly majorly fun. As mentioned you’ll roam around an open world entering into various types of races, and this is one area where the game feels like it could use some expanding. The environment isn’t as large as your typical open world game, but it is incredibly detailed with lots of well-designed roadways that will act as different circuits in the various events.

Then there’s the vehicle selection, which is just 5 to start, but those 5 are quite different from one another and have quite a lot of customization options to explore. Again, the level of quality and polish here puts much larger studios to shame. Everything is tied to an overall progression system for your driver as well as your various vehicles. This is the part of the game that has really sucked me in. Earning XP, unlocking new parts, tricking out your ride with the new gear, and then heading back out to race some more is a very satisfying game loop. It’s like playing a loot-based dungeon crawler except it’s a street racing game, and it’s awesome.

Also worth mentioning is that the racing itself is super fun. Very arcadey and very drift-focused. It can feel a little wonky at first but once you get the hang of things it’s extremely satisfying to carve around curves completely sideways while colored smoke billows from your tires and tunes blast out from the speakers. I think the developers were going for a very specific vibe with Static Shift Racing and I think they definitely nailed it.

With all these positive points does come some negative. First and foremost is that there just needs to be more game here. More open world areas, more vehicles, and more event types. To be fair this is all stuff that is supposedly already in the works and will be coming soon, but I’ve seen far too many games make promises they never followed through with so the proof will definitely be in the pudding should said pudding really materialize. The second thing is that this is a very free to play game, with a ticket system for entering races where the tickets are on cool-down timers as well as two types of in-game currency. So far none of this has been an issue, but that’s always how they start, right? Long term remains to be seen.

All that said the good definitely outweighs the bad here, and as jaded as I’ve become over the years I’d like to think that this is a developer that’s just passionate about a very specific type of racing game and wanted to make one of their own, and is just trying to negotiate the troubled waters of mobile gaming as best they can. What is here today is a very, very solid base to something that could become truly special, and the fact that it’s free does at least mean that anybody could try it out for themselves to see if Static Shift Racing revs their own engines as much as it has for me so far.

I say this quite often, but this was one of those weeks where it was almost painful to have to pick just one new game to be Game of the Week. There were a number of really cool games released this week, so be sure to check them out, but at the end of the day there was no way I wasn’t going with one of my favorite games released on other platforms last year, TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge from Tribute Games and Dotemu, which has now made its way to mobile this week courtesy of Playdigious as part of the Netflix Games library.

First off, the beat ’em up genre is one of my very favorites. I admit that I’m biased having grown up through the arcade era of the ’80s and ’90s when that was a dominant genre, and in this day and age I can say that it’s not a genre that’s aged particularly well. The classics that people like myself hold in such high regard are actually quite shallow, repetitive, and unfairly cheap when it comes to difficulty. That was fine when one of the design targets of these games was to get kids pumping quarters into a machine, but it doesn’t hold up so well today.

Back then though those negative aspects didn’t matter. It was all about teaming up with a buddy or three and playing as some of your favorite characters beating the snot out of your most hated villains. I routinely replay through these old games just for a quick nostalgia hit. The Simpsons Arcade Game, X-Men, Final Fight, and of course the original TMNT arcade games. And plenty more. I typically get 30 minutes to an hour of fun before the shallowness starts to wear thin, especially if I’m not playing co-op with someone else. It’s good for what it is, but like I said, it hasn’t aged all that well.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been deeper or more complex beat ’em ups released in the decades since, but I think it was really 2020’s Streets of Rage 4 that really brought the genre into a more contemporary setting. It showed us that combat could be more nuanced and strategic rather than button mashy. Unique game modes and progression systems showed that a beat ’em up didn’t need to be just some 20-minute linear campaign and instead it could actually offer a ton of meaningful replay value. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m also a major fan of Streets of Rage 4 (which is also phenomenal on mobile), and it’s from this same cloth that TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge is cut.

Ok, this has been a whole lot of words and I haven’t even talked about the game in question yet, but being that it was one of the marquee releases of last year on other platforms there should be no shortage of reviews or info should you need to seek it, including our own glowing review and our interview with the developers on bringing it to mobile. This is still the full fantastic game that is on other platforms already, but with excellent touch controls implemented as well as full physical controller support. There’s also some truly impressive online matchmaking that seems to always be populated with other people to play with, which feels exceedingly rare for a mobile game.

If I have to come up with a drawback for TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge, it’s that it requires having a Netflix subscription in order to play on mobile. That will no doubt turn off some people who either don’t have Netflix or would just rather pay upfront for the game the old-fashioned way, but that’s the world we’re living in nowadays. Thankfully the Netflix Games library is truly incredible and arguably a reason itself to subscribe to Netflix if you don’t already given how many great games you can play in return, but if it’s still a dealbreaker for you I can only urge you to seek out another platform to play TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge because games that exude this level of sheer joy and playfulness don’t come around all that often.

It was a tough week to choose just one Game of the Week with lots of good games coming out, so in these situations I always sort of default to whichever game I keep coming back to throughout the week. This time around that is the new iOS port of Wreckfest from Handy Games. It helps that the original release of Wreckfest, which was developed by Bugbear Entertainment, was already a beloved game on consoles and PC, so the source material here was always going to be good. What has really impressed me though is just how faithfully Handy Games has brought this technical marvel to mobile devices.

So at a basic level, Wreckfest is a lot of what you might expect from a destruction derby-style racing game. Multiple event types including full-blown destruction derbies, more traditional races, and some more off-the-wall event types, and tons of vehicles in all manner of shapes, sizes, and classes. There’s a wonderful career progression where you’ll play through various events earning points, leveling up, unlocking new parts and cars, and then upgrading your owned vehicles.

While it’s definitely standard-fare type stuff for any modern racing game, it’s worth noting that the progression system and drip-feed of new unlocks in Wreckfest is tuned especially well in that I frequently found myself playing “just one more event” which in turn becomes “just, like, a dozen more events” as I can’t wait for my next unlock or upgrade. With the extensive number of vehicles you can acquire, and the huge assortment of upgrades and parts you can apply to them, I don’t think it’s too out there to say that Wreckfest is like a racing game RPG in terms of its progression hooks.

The real hallmark feature here however is the destruction physics. Holy moly, the destruction physics. Your vehicle, and those of your opponents, can be damaged from basically any and every angle, and depending on how and where that damage comes in can greatly affect how your car handles after it gets wrecked. Not only does the damage affect performance, but it also causes an awe-inspiring amount of wreckage and debris. Parts and particles go flying all over, and it’s not just a visual flourish as most that debris will end up on the track waiting for some hapless racer to blast right through it.

The part of this that really surprised and delighted me is that the destruction isn’t limited to just the vehicles but to the tracks and environments as well. I’m so used to cheesing my way through turns in a racing game by just barreling into an opponent’s side and using them as a shield as I take a turn with way more speed than should have been possible, but when I instinctively went to do that in Wreckfest I was caught by surprise when both our cars just blasted right through the fencing around the track, and then into a bunch of tire barriers which sent dozens of tires careening all over the place.

Yes, the environments are wonderfully destructible and that means that most the time you can’t cheese your way through turns, but this is actually a big win as it leads to an even better strategy: Plowing into your opponents and sending them off the track. It’s so much fun, and practically required strategy, to be a dirty racer in Wreckfest. Of course your opponents won’t hesitate to be dirty right back to you too, so turnabout is fair play.

Ok, I could probably go on and on about all the cool things I love about Wreckfest, but we don’t have all day. This is a fully premium release that will set you back $9.99, and then there are multiple vehicle and item packs available as additional IAP. Nothing essential to completing or enjoying the main game, just extra stuff if you want. Oh, and Wreckfest on mobile supports physical controllers and has fully customizable virtual controls so you’re bound to find something that suits you. There’s also numerous options for adjusting graphical settings to target performance, battery life, or full visual splendor if that’s what you want. Handy Games never fails when it comes to options in their premium mobile ports.

If you already played and enjoyed Wreckfest on another platform and just want a version you can stick in your pocket, you should be more than pleased with this mobile offering. If you haven’t played this one before and enjoy racing games in general, but want something a bit out of the ordinary, Wreckfest definitely fits the bill. With visuals cranked up for devices that can handle it this is a jaw-dropping game to see running on a little iPhone, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s also some of the most fun I’ve had in quite some time.

It’s not that surprising that fast-action games played on a completely smooth touchscreen can get… messy. It’s been a thing since the dawn of mobile gaming. Sure, touchscreens can be an amazing input device for games that have been designed with them in mind, but when you try to make a more traditional controller-based game for mobile and rely on a whole bunch of virtual buttons to get the job done, it doesn’t always turn out great. The awesome thing is that it isn’t a black and white situation, and developers who think a bit outside the box can come up with clever ways to make a true action game that controls just fine using virtual buttons on a glass surface. That is exactly the case with Retro Abyss, by a developer that goes by the name Ben Big Game Studio.

On any other platform, you’d probably call Retro Abyss a combat-focused arena platformer. I mean, that’s what it is here, too. But there are a couple of key differences that make this something more unique, and something that plays really well on the touchscreen. One is that the whole game takes place underwater. So while you do move left and right, and you do press a jump button to jump just like any other platformer, you can also press jump multiple times in a row or simply hold it down and continue to rise up and up and up. Together with the game’s floaty physics, controlling your character feels very similar to a cave flyer, something like Jetpack Joyride, which feels super comfortable and familiar on a touchscreen.

The other big unique feature in Retro Abyss is how weapons work. You fire them by the tried-and-true touch and then drag method, which produces a dotted line showing you the direction your weapon will fire. Yes, pretty much like slingshotting Angry Birds around. There’s also a subtle bullet time-esque slowdown while you’re aiming, and together with the float around style of movement, makes combat this very delicate, almost ballet-like dance of jumping, aiming, dodging, and firing. Once you get the hang of everything it all starts to feel second nature, and there’s some truly satisfying moments as you nail a long-distance shot or narrowly avoid being hit by an enemy’s projectile. This is a fast-action game that’s been slowed down, but somehow doesn’t quite feel like it has been.

The weapons in Retro Abyss are also something worth highlighting. There are 4 different classes to play as, and they all play quite differently from one another. Each class also has 3 weapon types, and all of them can be upgraded multiple times over. For example, the Knight’s main attack shoots a sword straight forward, but the Archer’s main attack lobs 3 arrows that spread out and arc at different trajectories. There is also a Warrior and a Wizard class, and they too have very different attack types. Oh yeah, killing enemies and beating levels nets you points for scoring purposes, and coins for upgrading purposes. You can also earn some random bonuses after a level, with an extremely simplified equipment system offering up various necklaces or rings with different types of bonuses. It’s very basic, but it’s still a neat addition.

Retro Abyss’s main campaign has 15 levels, but with how differently each of the classes play, play through those 15 levels with each one feels like a pretty unique experience. It’s more like the game actually has 60 levels. The game is free to download with opt-in ads for extra chances at post-level bonuses, and the free portion also includes the Knight and Archer classes. A 99¢ IAP unlocks the full game which removes the opt-in ad stuff and unlocks the other two classes, the Warrior and Wizard. You also get a 50k coin bonus for going premium. Basically, you can have plenty of fun with the free portion of Retro Abyss, and at just a buck it’s kind of a no-brainer to unlock the full game if you enjoy what the free part has to offer. This is a really unique and fun game, and I haven’t even touched on how absolutely awesome its visuals or soundtrack are. I guess that’s all the more reason to download it for free and give it a spin for yourself.