Castlestorm – Free to Siege is a new realtime strategy tower defense game from Zen Studios. As you might imagine — because the word is right there in the title — it’s free to download. As these games go, the gameplay isn’t bad—varied enough to keep a gamer’s interest for more than a few minutes. But as usual in these cases, your overall enjoyment of the game will be tested by your ability to tolerate in-app purchase requests. Castlestorm offers plenty of IAPs, and the game prompts players to make purchases quite frequently. A paid option without all the ads and IAPs would have been nice.
A better name might have been Castlestorm – $1.99 to Siege.
Supertop’s Castro — High Fidelity Podcasts ($4) app has updated to version 1.1 with a completely new design.. The updated app features continuous play, so Castro can automatically play the next episode in your timeline — those episodes can be sorted, and users can control whether or not they’ll stream using cellular data. A new pitch shift algorithm claims to provide improved audio. The app has also added localizations and a sleep timer, among other changes. For heavy podcast listeners, Castro is worth a look, especially compared to Apple’s Podcasts app.
Square Order (free) is a new app for picking up orders from local businesses from Square, replacing its prior Square Wallet app.
Currently available in San Francisco and New York City, Order prompts a user to sign up with a name, a password, and a credit card linked to the orders. Once set up, the app will point the user to nearby participating businesses. You can pay and tip right from your phone, and be notified to pick up the order when it’s ready. Conceivably, you just walk in, grab your order and go. It should be a convenient option for those who eat out often, and Square says it’s “adding new places every day,” presumably preparing to add new locations beyond SF and NYC in the future.
The Twitter (free) app has added a number of iPad-only tweaks in version 6.5.
