Welcome to this week’s gaming edition of iPhone Gems. Today, we’re looking at four different but very interesting new games: a number puzzler, a bowling game, an update to a Skee-Ball title, and a cartoony boxer.
Our top pick of the week is Super K.O. Boxing 2 by GLU Games, and if you already have Ramp Champ, there’s a very compelling new In-App Download level pack for that title called the Halloween Pack. Read on for all the details.
It has been touted by some as the spiritual sequel to Drop7, a stylish, number-focused puzzler that has remained a low-key iLounge favorite for months. CountDown: DownToZero ($2) by Hondune Games isn’t quite as impressive, but it’s a good enough title to merit some attention. The idea: there’s an eight-block-wide well that numbers fall into from the sky. You touch numbers in sequence to remove them from the well before it fills completely with blocks.
What’s novel is the matching process: you need to touch one number and then continue to swipe in the direction of additional numbers that subtract from the first one to equal zero. Any two matching numbers will thus work—4 minus 4, 2 minus 2—but you’ll only score in the thousand-point range making such simple matches. It’s in longer matches, such as 4 minus 3 minus 1, or 6 minus 2 minus 1 minus 1 minus 2, and combinations of quick 2- and 3-matches that you can rack up points and survive. In Endless Mode, the game starts you with only 1, 2, 3, and 4 number blocks, but additional numbers are added as time goes on, and a Clear the Board mode begins with a full well and higher numbers right away.
We liked CountDown’s relatively clean presentation. Three skins are offered, the best of which has nice, modern-looking glowing blocks with small particle effects as they fall and match, but sound effects are minimal and music is non-existent. The chief problem is that the pacing’s not quite right for all players yet, as the game starts at a fast clip and doesn’t give novice players a chance to master the strokes before they’re swimming in the pool. Adding higher numbers as the game continues is a great idea, but the initially brisk speed of falling blocks prevents the challenge from becoming as intellectual as it could be; fast swiping quickly takes the place of deliberate thought. With additional development work—more and more stylish skins, better audio, and a more gradual progression of the game’s speed—this could be a truly great number and block puzzler. As-is, it’s fun for those who want something that’s mentally stimulating, and are willing to learn by making mistakes. iLounge Rating: B.
Of the thousands of iPhone and iPod touch games now in the App Store, the vast majority aren’t direct hits or near-misses, but rather big misses—the equivalent of throwing a dart at a dartboard and watching it disappear into thin air rather than even hitting the wall or floor.
Galactic Bowling ($5) by Perpetual FX Creative is a near-miss, the product of an apparently creative and talented art and design team that lacked for only one thing: a really good bowling user interface.
What Perpetual FX has come up with is an interesting premise: 11 completely 3-D polygonal characters and 11 different bowling lanes set on Earth and on various imaginary planets in outer space. The characters aren’t fantastic, but they’re diverse in appearance, with two male and two female humans, then seven weird-looking aliens, some with oddball items that they carry around for whatever reason while they’re bowling. Shaniqua from New York carries a boom box. Max from Australia has a surfboard. The Jar-Jar Binks-like Cest has a rocket launcher or something. They add nothing to the game, but they’re there. By comparison, the lanes—particularly the off-Earth ones—are designed with cool obstacles, such as flames and vortexes that appear at times from holes in the lanes, destroying or changing the location of your ball mid-roll. Corkscrews and even multi-path courses such as three-line lanes are, if not brilliant, really smart little additions to the bowling concept, making good use of the iPhone’s wide display. Notably, the game’s one-on-one Campaign mode takes you from level to level in a split-screen simultaneous mode so that you don’t have to watch passively as your opponent takes turns, another nice touch.
Though the graphics engine runs at a fluid frame rate and looks pretty good by iPhone 3-D standards, alongside decent to good stage-specific music, there’s a problem: the gameplay feels really off from moment one and never gets better. You’re supposed to tap repeatedly on a right-bottom power meter, then tap on your character to roll the ball, with tilting and other adjustments that can impact the ball’s direction while it’s in motion. For a variety of reasons, this interface never feels good or right; Perpetual could have just cloned the power meters from earlier iPhone bowling titles we’ve reviewed and been just fine. The weak controls contribute to a sense that you’re never totally in command of what happens on the lanes, so even though there are those corkscrews, vortexes, and flames, they too often feel like eye candy or nearly random elements inserted just to mess up your game. That’s a shame, as having lanes with obstacles is a great idea—there has to be a way to preserve these smart new additions to the bowling lanes while making them feel fun. The developer tries to throw in other elements, such as a laser gun to zap extra pins off the lane, but they don’t really work.
Ultimately, Galactic Bowling is at least a B+ caliber game visually, and an A in ambition for the price, let down by C-quality gameplay. We feel strongly that the developer should spend the necessary time to completely fix the control interface for this title, as it has all of the other elements necessary to be a truly novel bowling game. Only after those fixes are complete should it consider releasing a sequel; with even better characters and backgrounds, plus an improved control interface, it could have a huge hit on its hands. iLounge Rating: B-.
Non-trivial issues aside—the reasons it missed our high recommendation when we reviewed it in August—the Iconfactory’s Ramp Champ is amongst the very best games released for the iPhone and iPod touch this year.
Rather than using the 3-D graphics found in earlier, competing titles, this rendition of Skee-Ball-style “arcade bowling” uses impressively drawn 2-D artwork and offers a diverse collection of themed “ramps” with amusingly rendered still and moving targets. Ramp Champ ships with four themed ramps, and now offers eight additional ramps in packs of two via In-App Purchase, Apple’s tool to let developers charge extra fees for new levels. We covered the first two-packs called “Adventure Pack” and “Challenge Pack” in our initial review; now Iconfactory has added “Halloween Pack” and “Voyage Pack” for $1 a piece.
Halloween Pack is the more impressive of the two new offerings, bringing ramps called Trick-or-Treat and Grave Danger to the mix. Trick-or-Treat presents you with a house that initially looks abandoned but can be hit with balls to open its windows, triggering costumed kids to walk around in front. Besides hitting a high score, your goals are to hit challenging skeleton targets and/or enough other objects to produce an elite type of candy treat. Grave Danger presents a static graveyard with what initially appears to be a plain collection of gravestones; as you play, you learn which stones release white ghosts, who can be hit to make blue ghost targets appear, or skeletal hands, which make an organist target appear. Both of these ramp designs use fixed background graphics, but funny evolving targets that reminded us of the better moments in Iconfactory’s prior Happy Place and Ninja Attack add-ons; their spooky music is also spot-on. Collectively, they’re a great additional purchase.
By comparison, Voyage Pack is somewhat less impressive. Plunderin’ Pirates is a pirate ship-themed level that has the requisite seafaring music and a multi-level wooden boat with both stationary and moving targets. Its objectives are clear—reveal a mermaid and a skeleton—but achieving them through a combination of shots on the boat and into the water below is more an exercise in precision than fun. The unrelated other ramp, Star Struck, consists of a series of three changing backgrounds that depict a retro-styled rocketship journey to Mars. Here, the targets—people running around and flying—are relatively boring, and both the dreamy music and backdrops are fairly bland, but the fact that the art changes is enough to keep the ramp from being forgettable.
All four of these new ramps offer new challenges that fans of this game will appreciate, and to the extent that you’re looking for a way to extend the life of this already good title, purchasing either or both packs is a simple, cheap way to do so. That said, Halloween Pack strikes us as the best of the packs yet released—worthy of our high recommendation—with Voyage as the least appealing, and our underlying concerns about Ramp Champ’s controls still remain unresolved. With greater precision in the swiping mechanism, this could be a mandatory purchase for all iPhone and iPod touch gamers; as-is, it’s very, very close. iLounge Rating (Halloween Pack): A-. iLounge Rating (Voyage Pack): B.
Nintendo’s Punch-Out!! is the de facto standard for cartoony boxing games, and we’ve already reviewed quite a few iPhone titles that have attempted to emulate it both figuratively and literally. Super K.O.
