New Games
Implosion ($10) — Pushing the envelope of what Apple’s latest iOS devices can accomplish, Implosion delivers a console gaming experience from the visuals to the voice acting and orchestral soundtrack. This futuristic third-person dungeon crawler puts players in the role of one of the last surviving members of humanity who must don the newest War-Mech Series III battle suit to take on a mysterious alien life form, and solve the mysteries presented by a desolate Earth to ensure the survival of the species. The game manages to implement a very intuitive touchscreen control system, something that many similar games have struggled with in the past, providing a smooth gameplay performance.
Last Voyage ($1) — In start contrast to Implosion, Last Voyage proves that you don’t need flashy graphics to create an immersive gameplay experience.
Made almost entirely up of basic geometric shapes, the game takes players through a series of complex yet visually austere spaces that range from the psychedelic to the abstract. Made up of five chapters, each one takes the player through a completely different task, ranging from flying through portals to solving puzzles, and much of the magic of the game comes from the overall mystery and lack of explanation of what’s going to be required, leaving the user to more freely interact with the game and explore the concepts and objectives placed in front of them. Last Voyage includes 40 minutes of original soundtrack music that fits the style of the game very well.
New Apps + Updates
Glass Planner (free) — This new planning app from Slide Rule Software combines the best aspects of a calendar and to-do list into a unified planning experience with an elegant and clean design aesthetic, helping users focus more closely on tasks at hand while ensuring that longer term plans and goals can still be properly accounted for.
Tasks and appointments are unified into a single list, and in many ways treated as variations of the same thing — think either tasks with a time, or appointments without one — and an intuitive mode view lets users easily switch between a “Planning” view to see the big picture, and an “Act” view to focus on what needs to be — and can be — done in the moment. On the back-end, Glass uses iCloud Calendar to store and sync tasks, and provides a streamlined set of tools for either a simple day-to-day planner or a full task management system with tags, projects, checklists, prioritization, filtering, and more. Tasks themselves can have hard deadlines or merely “ideal” dates and remain floating. The free version provides a Simple mode, and users can upgrade to the full “Standard” version of Glass either by paying an in-app upgrade fee or by getting the upgrade for free by simply letting the app create a Facebook post to share with friends.
Instagram (free) — The extremely popular photo sharing app gets an update that adds two new creative tools, Color and Fade, providing users with the ability to add color overlays to shadows or highlights or provide photos with an aged film effect.
