Publisher/Developer: Big Blue Bubble
Genre: Interactive book
Price: $2.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: Nostalgic and brilliant interactive fiction. A little slow at times though.
Pros: Tells a great fantasy story that you can take part in
Cons: No automap function and combat is slow

When I was a fair bit younger and an avid reader, I sold my soul to Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson’s Fighting Fantasy books. At the time, they were truly innovative, and my love for them led to my love of the RPG genre. They probably seem very simple nowadays to those who didn’t experience them the first time round. Your mind, a pen and a die was all that you needed to undertake your fantasy journey. Each page of the book offered you a decision as to where or what to do next. Some choices were as simple as choosing to go left or right in a maze, while others were bordering on moral decisions. Besides the options available to you, the stories which would unfold were perhaps not the most high-brow of tales, but they were extremely gripping for a young teenager at the time. In the case of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, you play an adventurer who has set out to find the treasure hidden within the mountain’s cavern. It’s a fantastic premise for an iPhone application as the game is part story and part game anyhow, essentially an interactive book.

Everything for the most part works well. Fans of the Fighting Fantasy will immediately adore the game thanks to its faithful adaptation, while newcomers to the series should enjoy it providing they’re not expecting fast paced action. Not much can be said in terms of graphical quality as this really is more of an ebook but the additional drawings supplied with this version are nice to look at and match the theme well. Dice rolls are taken via shaking your device and these are nice and responsive unlike other games which have been known to involve quite rigorous shakes. Unfortunately the fighting system is rather slow. This is mostly down to the fact that the game likes to show you each calculation that is made in the fight, which gets rather slow and tedious all too quickly. It’d be great to see a future update which introduces the option to skip these dice rolls and considering an update has already been unveiled in recent days, hopefully this will happen soon.

One other irritating issue is that there is no auto map facility. As the game (much like the book) kindly points out at the start, it’s a good idea to map out a certain section of the game to help you traverse the game. So why no auto map function? Things quickly get confusing without a map to revert back to yet it seems a bit excessive to expect an iPhone player to also have pen and paper in hand when it really shouldn’t be neccessary.

Other than these two complaints, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is an extremely sound adaptation of a classic adventure game book. As a fan of Fighting Fantasy, I loved it, and I anticipate my favourites such as Deathtrap Dungeon being available in the future. It’s not perfect but it is excellent fun.

Publisher/Developer: Assyria
Genre: Squish Em up
Price: $0.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: The foundations are there for a great game, just a few niggling flaws
Pros: Good, mindless fun. Perfect for pick up and play goodness.
Cons: Not many levels on offer. No ‘resume play’ option.

Within seconds, Picnic Panic reminded me of the likes of Flight Control — in my book this is a very good sign. Picnic Panic isn’t as refined yet but what is there forms a great foundation for hopefully a fantastic budget game in the future.

The concept is simple: there are bugs coming to eat your picnic food and you have to squish them before they eat everything. This is easily done by tapping the screen where they are. There are a wide variety of bugs to squash, each with their own unique features. Some are easily killed with one touch; others require multiple taps of the finger, while some are annoyingly fast at getting away. Much like a Tower Defence game, things quickly become a matter of prioritising. There ends up being so many different bugs coming towards your food that it’s essential that you react quickly and focus on the more dangerous bugs such as the annoyingly fast wasps.

As simple as this may sound, this is pretty much Picnic Panic to a tee. Fortunately though it is good fun. It’s satisfying squishing the various bugs and trying to beat your previous high score. Picnic Panic is somewhat rough around the edges, though. It’s a perfect game to drop in and out of in 5-10 minute bursts but this is where one of the real downsides to the title comes into play, there’s no way to resume play. Quit out of the game to answer a call or SMS for example, and you can’t return later. It’s annoying and something I hope will be swiftly rectified in future updates. Also things get rather hard quickly. The fact you can’t squish more than one bug at once makes things even trickier and it feels like the only way you can get big high scores is to have lightening fast reflexes. The ability to be able to touch a few different bugs at a time would certainly have evened this difficulty spike out a bit.

Overall Picnic Panic is flawed but still enjoyable. At times it does feel a little bit like a Work In Progress project with quite limited levels on offer and the much needed ‘Resume Play’ facility, but what is there is good fun and worth a look at its low price of 99c.

Publisher/Developer: EA Mobile
Genre: Board game
Price: $4.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: Faithful conversion of Monopoly but cheating AI lets it down badly
Pros: Looks and plays just like Monopoly….
Cons: ….except the AI seems unbeatable!

Right at the first hurdle, the idea of Monopoly on the iPhone falls flat on its face. You see, maybe I’m sadistic, but the most joy you can gain from Monopoly is playing it against friends and family and destroying them financially. We’ve all got our own tactics to achieve this. Mine? I tend to go for the mid range locations and buy as many hotels as possible, gradually wiping out my opponents’ money stockpile. Eventually they succumb and I’m victorious and smile smugly at them. Yeah, I’m evil like that.

As such, Monopoly on my iPhone seemed a little foreign to me. The first thing I checked in fact were the multiplayer options: fortunately it wasn’t bad going with local Wi-Fi play and pass and play multiplayer available, but I was still unconvinced how it would be as good as exchanging physical Monopoly money with each other. And I was right. The graphics are comprehensive and just right for this kind of game, the ability to shake the iPhone to roll the dice works nicely and it’s all just right. At times I did have a few problems with ‘Low system memory’ errors but that may well be my aging 2G iPhone at fault rather than the game’s.

The main flaw here, however, is somewhat more unforgivable. The AI cheats! Maybe it’s just me that sucks but it all seems to happen far too frequently, to the extent that it feels like the AI is cheating me out of success. I’m no sore loser but the dice seemed to be clearly rigged. The AI was always avoiding my properties by some weird form of ‘luck’. It just gets so infuriating that it put me off playing the game. I knew I’d lose anyway.

It’s a shame, as in all other respects this game is a pretty comprehensive conversion of Monopoly. It looks accurate and the early tutorials are great at explaining just how to play. The game’s certainly got potential but up against AI alone, it just makes you want to throw your iPhone out the window, or maybe just delete the app instead. For $4.99 it really isn’t great value for money unless you have other friends to play against, as at least you know then that they’re not cheating you out of a fair game.

Publisher/Developer: Connect2Media
Genre: Puzzle
Price: $1.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: Ideal commuter fodder for puzzle fans
Pros: Seemingly infinite puzzles to complete
Cons: Won’t convert non-Sudoku/Kakuro/Tenpenki lovers

Do you like playing Sudoku, Kakuro and Tenpenki in your lunch break or during your commute? If you can answer “yes” to this, then go download 365 Puzzle Club now. If you hate these puzzle games, you know what to do. If for some reason you’re still undecided, then read on.

Sudoku is a huge phenomenon all over the world these days. Its history is distinctly longer than most people would think I suspect. I was surprised to discover in my research that a puzzle bearing more than a passing resemblance to Sudoku appeared in the late 19th century. In the past four years, Sudoku has become huge business with there being many, many magazines devoted to it as well as various games. It’s a simple concept, as so many popular games are, put numbers back into a grid of typically 9×9 squares. The catch is that each number can only be used once per line making things a little fiddlier.

Kakuro (while I’m educating you on Japanese logic puzzles) is a form of a mathematical crossword. You add the numbers to the grid to add up to the correct number highlighted at the top of the line. Again, no numbers can be used twice on the same line. Tenpenki is essentially similar to the logic puzzler Picross. You must mark squares as full or empty in order to create a set pattern. It all seems like very simple stuff, but it’s very addictive and perfect for a daily commute or lunch break as many puzzles only take 10-15 minutes to complete at the very most.

365 Puzzle Club captures the daily element of these puzzles perfectly by offering a different puzzle every day in its Calendar mode. It works exactly how you would expect with a variety of difficulty modes to challenge your grey matter. However it’s a shame to see that there doesn’t seem to be any way of going ‘backwards’ and doing the puzzles from October for example.

There’s more to 365 Puzzle Club fortunately, with a Season mode where you can undertake different puzzles one after another to ‘complete’ the year as well as a quick play mode meaning there’s plenty to keep puzzle fans busy. Throw in Facebook Connect functionality and 365 Puzzle Club is a pretty well rounded product. It’s a game that is solely aimed at Sudoku/Kakuro/Tenpenki fans but this is to its credit as it does exactly what you want with no excessive flashiness or pointless game modes to make it noticeable to non-Sudoku fans. This is an ideal game for puzzle fans at a great price.

Publisher/Developer: Chillingo
Genre: Point and Click Adventure
Price: $6.99
Acquired: Review Copy Provided
Verdict: Challenging point and click adventure that provides plenty of value for money
Pros: Interesting storyline especially for Jules Verne fans
Cons: Rather buggy at times and a bit heavy going for newcomers to the genre

To be very British for a moment: Blimey, this game’s huge! I’m used to reviewing small little games that are essentially glorified flash games, but this time round I’m dealing with a behemoth of a point and click adventure in the form of Jules Verne’s Secrets of the Mysterious Island. It’s huge in every sense of the word with me quickly realising that downloading it directly to my iPhone was a mistake. At over 700 MB in size, downloading this took forever! I strongly suggest if you do purchase this, you buy it through iTunes and wait out the download. Of course you don’t know yet whether you should buy this…well, to solve it quickly:  if you like point and click adventures then you need to buy this game, just expect to be slightly overwhelmed at first, there’s a lot to explore!

Secrets of the Mysterious Island carries on from where its predecessor Return to Mysterious Island left off. Just as main character Mina was about to leave the island, a sudden volcanic eruption brought her plane down and trapped her on an apparently uninhabited island. Without really spoiling anything, the game begins with you playing a monkey by the name of Jep who saves Mina,  and so begins your adventure! This time around you must restore a shield which saves the island from the threat of pollution. For those of you who have played the previous title, there are also a number of twists and secrets unveiled as things progress.

Controlling the action works reasonably well, although it did take a little while to properly adjust. Each scene is a static image where you can tap on things to investigate and interact with them. You start out playing as Jep the monkey, but at various other opportunities you can take control of Mina, with the crucial difference being that Mina can combine items in the inventory. Jep can’t, as he is a monkey after all. Combining items quickly becomes useful as any experienced Monkey Island or Myst players will know. It was a bit of a shame to see that occasionally you could combine items that are then needed at a later date separately, causing some game breaking problems and forcing you to resort to older saves. Hopefully this will be rectified in a future update. Switching from screen to screen involves a sweeping movement of your finger unless you’re a 3GS user, in which case the internal compass can be used to change your direction. This is a fantastic feature and one that makes the game infinitely simpler to navigate around.

As a final neat touch, Chillingo have included a link to the online walkthrough which is extremely useful, especially in the early stages when you might find things a little overwhelming. Rightly so, considering the game will take you a good 15 hours or more to complete and will certainly tax you at times with both very lateral puzzles and some slightly illogical ones, which is to be expected in this genre.

If you’re a point and click adventure fan then this really is a no brainer. It’s a challenging adventure game and provides plenty of entertainment for its $7 price tag. If you’re a newcomer to the genre though, I would suggest that something like Secret of Monkey Island which is a bit more newbie friendly and light hearted.

Publisher/Developer: Gameflow Entertainment
Genre:Puzzler
Price: $0.99
Verdict: Fun in five minute bursts but nothing very innovative to see here.
Pros: It does everything very well…
Cons: It’s just nothing that we haven’t seen before

I might as well get it out of the way: Penguin Break is a very typical-looking puzzle game. It’s not quite a Match 3 game but it’s near enough in terms of the good old ‘match things of a certain color’ mechanics. However despite its lack of originality, Penguin Break is quite good fun and if you just can’t get enough of these types of games, it is worth a look especially bearing in mind it’s only 99c.

One thing that Penguin Break has is bundles of is charm. It’s just plain cute playing a penguin that has to throw snowballs to clear the screen of coloured penguins. It’s also seasonally topical too, just the thing for the Christmas spirit…kind of.

There are two modes of play on offer. Escape consists of an empty screen slowly becoming increasingly full of various coloured penguins. Throw the relevant coloured snowball at the penguin and you clear the penguin along with all the same coloured ones nearby. It’s simple stuff that we’ve all seen countless times before. As the game progresses, things do get increasingly harder which is welcome to see although may put off younger gamers. Fortunately there are various power ups that appear from time to time to make things easier, changing all penguins to one colour or a bomb which can clear a number of penguins in one throw. Presumably the bomb doesn’t damage the penguins in any way of course!

The Frenzy mode is the reverse of Escape in a way. The screen is filled with penguins and your job is to clear them. Simple huh? The only thing is you’re up against the clock. Each level you complete extra time is added to help you get through a few more levels and so on.

Both modes are admittedly pretty similar but Penguin Break is mindless entertainment for a few minutes. The addition of Facebook functionality for score comparison amongst friends is a welcome feature to add a bit of competitiveness to the affair. Ultimately Penguin Break is nothing amazing but it is quite fun. It does everything it intends to do perfectly well; it just doesn’t do anything exceptionally well. Give it a try if you’re desperate for yet another Match 3 style game.

Publisher/Developer: The Internet Guru LLC
Genre:Photo Based Puzzler
Price: $0.99
Verdict: Fun for kids, not really worth it for the adults
Pros: Mindless fun to pass a few minutes
Cons: It gets dull fast

Sometimes there is so much content to a game that it would be easy to spend hours and thousands of words discussing them and their wonder. Simply put they evoke so much emotion in the reviewer that it is child’s play to be able to rant or rave about them at great length. Then there are the titles that are so basic and uncomplicated that it’s tricky to know just what to say.

Photo Madness is one such title. It’s a ridiculously simple concept to start with. A heavily pixelated photo appears on screen, as the time ticks down quickly the photo becomes clearer and clearer until either you run out of time or you click one of the four answers available to you. That’s it. In 37 words the concept has been perfectly explained. So now what?

Well, the game does do a good job of it. There are over 930 photos in the game comprising of 62 different animals. There are varying skill levels available as well as an online leaderboard to compare scores. This is definitely it. How much enjoyment you get from this all depends on how much fun that sounds.

I found it OK,but I’m really not sure why anyone would bother going out of their way to buy this. Sure it’s only $0.99 but then so is Flight Control and Pocket God so why choose Photo Madness? If you want a game that takes a matter of a minute to play through a game, then I guess this is perfect. The ability to be able to challenge friends is quite a nice touch, but it’s a pity it’s not made simpler as challenge codes do feel a little reminiscent of needing codes to return to a level in 16-bit games of the 1990s.

There is of course one demographic that I suspect will really enjoy this game: kids. It reminds me of a section of Big Brain Academy on the Wii which my young cousins adore, so I can see them enjoying this a lot. However if you’re after action, this really isn’t for you; it really isn’t very amazing and I’ve still yet to find the ‘madness’ that the title promised me.

Publisher/Developer: A. Kurulenko
Genre:Battleship/Board Game
Price: $2.99
Verdict: Wait for a Price Drop
Pros: Online multiplayer!
Cons:A little pricey for what it offers, essentially something you can do with pen and paper

Anybody else remember those childhood days when we didn’t have Game Boys or iPods to entertain us? Instead we had pen and paper games like Tic-Tac-Toe, Cross and Lines and of course the unbeatable Battleship.

It was a simple guessing game. Four grids of squares were drawn up and each individual square numbered and lettered for identification purposes. Then each player arranged a number of different ’ships’ on each square, such as an aircraft carrier (consisting of 5 squares) ranging to a little patrol boat of only 2 squares. The other player then has to figure out where each ship is located to win the game. Simple stuff, I know, and I’m sure somewhere you are yawning with boredom at the concept, but it really was quite fun.

So we come to an iPhone clone of Battleship: Sea Battle Classic. It’s actually a pretty faithful conversion too. Action is on a grid of 10×10 squares with 10 ships of predefined sizes to place, and well, that’s it really. Graphics are quite appropriate with everything looking how you would expect a pen and paper version of Battleships should look, with scribbles and hand drawn crosses depicting the action. Selecting a point is extremely simple as well as positioning the pieces at the start of play.

Sea Battle Classic offers a nice variety of options when it comes to who you can play against. Besides playing against the game AI, you can also play against another friend via wi-fi and bluetooth, and most pleasingly: play online. Currently there seems to be quite a reasonable community for the game online so it wasn’t hard to find someone to play against at peak times. Only time will tell how long this will last for but it’s good to see it still quite busy after a few weeks of release. An online matchmaking mode in a future update would be particularly nice to see though.

Sea Battle Classic is a pretty faithful conversion overall. But is it worth $2.99? Well this all depends on just how much you love Battleship and whether friends of yours plan on buying this too. It is good fun to play, particularly if you want a game that is easy to drop in and out of for five minute doses. However it does feel a little on the steep side for such a basic concept, making it a little difficult for me to recommend to everyone. If you’re made of money, though, go for it!

Publisher/Developer: Big Blue Bubble
Genre:Turn Based RPG
Price: $1.99
Verdict: An average turn based RPG that doesn’t live up to its potential
Pros: 20 hours of gameplay
Cons:No auto save, uninteresting storyline

There’s nothing worse than a disappointing and average game if you ask me. I think it’s seeing a game that doesn’t fulfill its potential that makes it so saddening. They also tend to make the most boring games, as at least the terrible games are so awful that it’s entertaining to see just how bad it can get. But dull games are just plain old dull and pointless. Unfortunately, this is the case with Elven Chronicles. It’s not terrible, but nor is it very exciting. It is the most generic turn based RPG possible and distinctly lacking in soul. It’s a shame really, as it initially seemed very promising with some cutesy graphics and a nice Zenonia-style feel to it.

Over the years I have played countless RPGs and yes even I, the RPG nut, will admit that many stories are rather clichéd and predictable. But I think Elven Chronicles’ wins in the clichéd stakes. It’s the usual ‘young male warrior is trying to find out more about his past and his destiny’ but it really didn’t feel very interesting at all.

There are of course a number of optional quests along the way and most of these felt very routine in nature. So many were simply a matter of killing a certain number of enemies or collecting a particular number of items. On the plus side the battle system works relatively well despite being possibly a little simple. As you would expect in an RPG, there is plenty of experience-gaining and leveling up to do. Unfortunately, there are no real opportunities to customize your characters, with unlocks seemingly being pre-defined and attributes increasing at a set rate.

Controls are a little hit and miss. Being able to tap anywhere to move rather than being restricted to a virtual d-pad does work quite well for movement. However at times it can be a little inaccurate, particularly if you have larger fingers. This can make it harder to select characters to interact with or to move around to dodge the monsters on screen.

It’s certainly good to see the turn based RPG genre be represented on the App Store but if only Elven Chronicles was that bit more special. Having said that if you are a total RPG nut, you could do a lot worse than this. Currently at a mere $1.99, the 20 hours of gameplay it offers is great value. It’s just a shame that you may find yourself ‘forgetting’ to return to Elven Chronicles in favor of more interesting games such as Zenonia or Wolfenstein RPG. If this were a school report, it would simply state ‘Could try harder,’ but nice attempt Big Blue Bubble.

Publisher/Developer: Gamevil
Genre:Action RPG
Price: $5.99
Verdict: Enjoyable hack n slash action but a little expensive for what it is
Pros: Great for five minute bursts of play
Cons:Story is a very complicated mess

Throughout the years, I’ve adored playing side scrolling beat em ups. It all started with Streets of Rage and Golden Axe and ever since then I’ve been hooked by their simplicity but compelling nature. In juxtaposition to that, I’ve also always enjoyed RPGs thanks to their cerebral nature, the fact that you can use magic, level up in an unique manner and become stronger. This is why Hybrid: Eternal Whisper should be perfect for me and it mostly is, but I did feel a little cold after my experiences with it.

Hybrid: Eternal Whisper’s story centers on Grey, a guy who happens to have got caught up in the fight to save the world of Platina. Original stuff I’m sure you’ll agree! The plot gets quickly excessively convoluted and far too complicated for its own good. It felt like every other minute that a new character suddenly appeared to tell yet more tales and to complicate the plot even further. There is certainly a lot to take in story wise, but I have to admit it didn’t really grab me much.

Luckily the combat system, which is the other core component of the game, did grab me and I found Hybrid to be a quite enjoyable button masher, well, touchscreen masher technicallly. Controls are simple, with a virtual d-pad available for movement and one button for a sword slash, however there is also the ability to swap weapon arms to create different attacks. Besides this, there is also a great gesture based system for casting spells, it takes a little while to get used to but it works well most of the time, with occasional problems with the game recognizing the correct gesture.

The game will certainly last a while offering 70 different scenarios. The learning curve is for the most part quite reasonable, although at times I did find the difficulty suddenly ramped up quite hugely which could be annoying for some. It was however nice to see regular save points meaning that Hybrid: Eternal Whisper was the perfect game for me to drop in and out of in five minute doses.

Overall, Hybrid: Eternal Whisper is a fairly enjoyable game on the whole although somewhat pricey for what it offers. It has some great RPG elements to it with the ability to combine items and upgrade certain skills, but I did find it a little lacking. The complicated story meant that I couldn’t quite get into it or feel attached to the characters. However as a button masher, it works extremely well so perhaps more of a game for those who want more action based RPGs than a true RPG such as the fantastic Zenonia for example.