Ubisoft's Valiant Hearts -- made, like Child of Light, with
the studio's UbiArt Framework -- has been hailed as a beautiful example of
storytelling. The 2D side-scrolling puzzle game takes place in World War I,
and you play through the stories of five characters: Karl, a German soldier
separated from his love; Emile, a French farmer who becomes a POW; Anna, a
Belgian battlefield nurse; Freddie, an American soldier; and George, a British
pilot. Although interspersed with humour, the game aspires to show the human
side of war, with the actual gameplay almost an adjunct. But the stories are so
beautifully told that it's worth your time just to experience them. (Trailer)
Bossa Studios is the team behind Surgeon Simulator, but
don't expect to find any similarities. Twelve A Dozen is a side-scrolling
puzzle platformer with an interesting gameplay mechanic. You play Twelve, a
resident of the microscopic town of Dozenopolis. Disaster has struck, and Dozenopolis is
falling apart -- but little Twelve is on the case. As she journeys to fix the
town, she can add and subtract numbers to solve puzzles -- making the game both
educational (for children) and fun (for everyone). (Trailer)
Putting aside the "Slap the colour pink on it, et voila now girls can enjoy it", Angry
Birds: Stella is actually a pretty decent entry in the extensive Angry Birds
stable. The graphics are top-notch, and the new group of birds brings something
new to the gameplay, even though their abilities are similar to --if not the
same as -- those of birds we've seen before. It's also designed to be a little
easier, with an on-screen guide to show you the best trajectory in which to
fire your birds, which makes it a great starter title for the new Angry Birds
player. (Trailer)
As the name suggests, Stealth is a game about sneaking. You
play an assassin completing a series of missions, infiltrating bases or getting
through foe-riddled locations to complete an objective. The catch is that
guards and other enemies have weapons much stronger than your armour -- so
getting caught and ending up in combat is the worst possible option for you. It's
no Assassin's Creed in terms of parkour, but that's not what Stealth is about:
it's about carefully watching your enemies, learning their patterns, and
striking them down when the window of opportunity opens. (Trailer)
As promised, Squenix is rolling out the Dragon's Quest series, so
expect to see more of these in the month's to come. This month, it's the first
game in the franchise, at an unexpectedly low price for what we've come to
expect from the developer.
Rarely -- if ever -- have we seen an endless runner with as
much style as Fotonica. It bills itself as "a first-person game about
running, jumping, sense of speed, and discovery", and that's accurate. But it's also incomplete. Fotonica is hard -- and beautiful, in a minimal,
wire-frame sort of way. All you ever see of your avatar are two hands in front
of you as you run through the mysterious, neon environments, holding a finger
on the screen to continue your momentum, and lifting to leap chasms. And it's
all about perfection: the perfect speed, the perfectly timed jump, the perfect
score. (Trailer)
If you want an RPG experience that isn't a rabbit warren of
skill trees and gear upgrades and endless buffs, Goblin Sword has you covered.
The story is pretty simple: monsters have invaded your village, you have to
slay them. It's a side-scrolling action platformer with its roots pretty
firmly in the arcade era, and the gameplay takes place in levels where you have
to slay foes and defeat traps -- and, of course, you do get loot and upgrades.
It's actually darn near perfect. (Trailer)
Boboshi is a small indie studio based in Stockholm, Sweden
that primarily makes education apps for its local audience -- but occasionally
busts out something for the rest of the world. A couple of years ago it was
quiz game ExQuizit -- one of our
favourites of its kind. Now, the team has released a new kind of knowledge app,
and it's great. It's a map-based geography challenge, where you're tasked with
locating places on a globe. It could be capital cities, or buildings, natural
features, or monuments. And it's surprisingly good fun, allowing you to learn
geography in a way that doesn't feel condescending or difficult.
This is one from the team behind Block Fortress. It's an RPG
based in an unstable, floating-voxel-based world, inspired by Mega Man Battle
Network and Bastion. It also reminds us rather strongly of last month's Almightree
and Kitfox Games' Shattered Planet. As you explore the world, you'll fight monsters in a system that combines real-time, lane-based combat
with spellcasting -- but the spells you can use are limited by how much power
you have and what spells are actually in your bag. The game also offers
extraordinary depth in terms of character customisation -- it's a brilliant
complement to you RPG collection. (Trailer)
Anomaly: Warzone Earth flipped tower defence on its head by
introducing tower offence, and the final game in the series has flipped that
around again -- this time, the humans have started fighting back -- and you
have to defend your homeworld against their invasion in a series of fast-paced,
increasingly difficult (and jaw-droppingly gorgeous) battles. (Trailer)
Cosmophony is a game that sublimely mixes minimalist
graphics, a fantastic electronic soundtrack, on-rails arcade shooting and
rhythm into a heady mix that's extraordinarily hard to put down. And if that
combination doesn't thrill you to your toe-tips, there's something wrong with
your heart. (Trailer)
This little puzzle game is all about guiding your "squiggles"
-- little wriggly-tadpole-looking things -- into the coloured portals by
dragging them around the screen with your finger. You can't go too fast, or
some get left behind, caught behind obstacles, or destroyed on hazards; and
coloured barriers will only let squiggles of the same colour through. Each level
is a maze of planning, in a charmingly hand-drawn style. (Trailer)
For those who are unfamiliar with "escape the
room" style games, they're a version of point-and-click where you have to
search your environment for clues and objects that allow you to escape the room
you're in and move onto the next room. Escape the Hellevator is based on that
style of gameplay -- set in an elevator, where you play Clarence Ridgeway, on
his way to the emergency department -- if you can escape the clutches of a
mysterious priest intent on sending you straight to hell for your sins.
It's a fascinating use of the format -- unfolding the protagonist's life, room
by room, with eternity on the line. (Trailer)
Originally made for Ouya, BombSquad has made the port across
to Android. It's a frantic, multiplayer arena game based -- strangely enough --
on blowing everyone up, with a massive range of explosive, costumes and
minigames -- all with the a guarantee of explosive mayhem. (Trailer)
Real-time strategy title Ice has distilled the genre down to
its purest form: nothing but bases, units and attacking team. The aim, of
course, is to capture the most bases. There are five teams: you and four AI
teams. You have to direct your swarms to conquer bases, but you can only attack
those bases attached by lines in your team's colour; and you cannot separate
your swarm -- if you direct your swarm to a target, the entire swarm will go,
leaving your conquered bases undefended until more units can regenerate. It's
done a masterful job of picking out only the essential elements around which to
build a game. (Trailer)
We do like our quiz games. Iconic is a little bit like 4 Pics
1 Word, in that it shows you an image and tasks you with figuring out what it
means, choosing from a selection of letters at the bottom of the screen.
However, rather than photographs, it uses pictograms -- which you have to
solve, figuring out which band, film or famous person the images represent.
It's sleekly designed and surprisingly addictive. (Trailer)
Piano City originally launched some time ago -- but,
bafflingly, the game's text was entirely in Cyrillic, which made unplayable to
a great percentage of the audience. This relaunch brings not only English, but
a hefty update as well. It's a rhythm game in a similar style to Harmonix's
offerings, only on a piano: you play the notes as they hit the bar, with the
difference being that you have a much wider range of notes rather than Rock
Band's four lanes. It's actually really good fun, with a campaign mode
including quests, and versus multiplayer. (Trailer)
We
don't have a slide dedicated to iOS releases that follow previous Android releases, so this one's going to have to
stand alone: August's stellar Android horror release (also on Steam) came out for
iOS last month; if you're a horror fan, it's definitely worth picking up.
