app review: Plants vs Zombies
March 9, 2010 by Steve Loopipe · Leave a Comment
Plants vs Zombies takes the tower defense genre, which has been done repeatedly on the iPhone, and brings a fun, unique spin that makes it accessible both to tower defense junkies and casual gamers alike. The premise is that you are a typical homeowner whose property has become the target of the inevitable zombie apocalypse. Your only defense comes in the form of your lawn; each perfectly manicured square of grass is a place where you can plant one of an array of floral defenders, more of which become unlocked as you progress through the game. As zombies march down each of the five rows of grass, your plants attack them until they dispatch with the zombies, or the zombies eat through all the plants and overtake the house.
What really makes the game entertaining from beginning to end is the variety, both in terms of the plants that become available and the zombies that besiege your house. While you start out with only peashooters that shoot straight ahead and wall-nuts to act as shields, you eventually get all kinds of plants that shoot in multiple directions, eat zombies whole, and detonate to take out large groups of zombies at once. In fact, later in the game, choosing the right combination of plants to take with you into your limited number of slots is as important as actually managing the plants during the stage. Similarly, the zombies begin to show more personality as the game progresses, introducing zombies like the grandpa zombie who stumbles around reading his newspaper but charges forward in a rage when the plants destroy the paper, the Zamboni riding zombie who leaves a trail of ice in his path (which zombies in snowmobiles then take advantage of), and the Michael Jackson lookalike zombie who summons backup dancer zombies to recreate the Thriller video. It’s clear that a lot of care and thought went in to the design of the characters, and seeing a new type of zombie often made me laugh out loud.
The variety extends to the stages as well; while you start in the front yard in the daytime, you eventually move to night, where graves pop up to keep you from planting; to the backyard pool area, where you need to build lily pads to plant on top of water; and finally to the roof, where the angles create new challenges. There are also some mini-games thrown in from time to time, like bowling with wall-nuts or whack-a-zombie, which break up the standard stages nicely.
The art style just adds to the overall experience. The game is drawn in a very cartoonish style; these are not Resident Evil style zombies that are going to scare anyone. The plants, too, all have faces and expressions – sunflowers look happy to hang out, while some of the more offensive plants like the squash or the doom-shroom clearly mean business. Honestly, the game is as much fun to watch as it is to play. Performance is also very good; there was some slowdown on my iPod Touch 2G, but that typically only happened toward the end of a stage when there were a lot of zombies and plants on the screen all at once, and by that point you’re usually just sitting back and seeing if your strategy is going to hold up or not.
My only complaint about Plants vs Zombies, honestly, is the difficulty. Specifically, there is only one difficulty level which may not provide enough of a challenge to many players. I’m by no means an expert at tower defense games, but I was able to breeze through the game relatively quickly; the only stage I had to attempt more than once was the final boss. There is a second quest of sorts after you finish the game which is slightly complicated by the game randomly choosing three plants for you, but even this isn’t a major handicap until late in the game. The iPhone version is also missing some of the individual puzzle levels that the full PC game has (similar to Peggle’s challenge levels), so once you finish the main quest, there’s not much more to do.
Even though it’s a bit on the easy side, though, Plants vs Zombies is an absolute must-own for any iPhone owner. The main quest will last you several hours of non-stop entertainment, and you’ll probably want to play it through a second time even though there’s not much new there, just because it’s that much fun. Plants vs Zombies may have been a long time in the making, but it’s clear that PopCap used all the time to make a polished game that is fun from start to finish. If this is what the zombie apocalypse is going to be like, I can’t wait for the undead to come so I can break out my spade and trowel.
Learn more about Plants vs Zombies for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store
app review: Angry Birds
March 3, 2010 by Steve Loopipe · 2 Comments
That’s the premise of Angry Birds, a physics-based puzzle game by Clickgamer, published by prolific iPhone publisher Chillingo. Each stage presents the pigs ensconced in some sort of precariously (or sometimes not so precariously) assembled stronghold, and your job is to fling the birds from the slingshot at the weak points of the building to cause it to collapse on top of all the pigs inside.
This would be entertaining enough if that was it, but there are also several different species of birds, some of which have special abilities activated by tapping the screen mid-flight. Blue birds can split themselves into three, yellow birds can get an extra burst of speed, back birds can blow themselves up like bombs, and white birds can drop exploding eggs from above. So part of the challenge is just figuring out the right angle, and part of it is knowing exactly when to activate these abilities for maximum damage. It’s all a lot of fun, and there are generally several different ways to go about each level. As far as content is concerned, a recent update added 42 levels, bringing the total over 100, so there’s plenty to do.
The art style is like something straight out of the Saturday morning cartoons, which is very appropriate for this type of game. Defeated pigs simply disappear in a puff of smoke, as do the used up birds. Everything runs very smoothly on my iPod Touch 2G. The sound leaves a bit to be desired, though, with no background music to speak of and just angry squawks for sound effects.
While Angry Birds is a lot of fun, there are a couple of issues I have with the game. First of all, the only way to unlock a level is to complete the level before it, so if you get stuck on a particular puzzle, you can’t do much else with the game until you get past that, which can be extremely frustrating. Similarly, while there is a lot of content, there’s not to a ton of replay value; once you’ve beaten a level, while you can go back and try to get a perfect star rating, you typically won’t want to. There’s also a certain amount of imprecision built into the game that’s a bit atypical for a physics puzzle game, so it’s hard to tell if you’re just missing your targets or if your strategy is fundamentally flawed. (It’s worth noting that the game does show you the trajectory of your last bird, but even that sometimes isn’t enough to guide you where you’re supposed to be aiming.) Finally, the order in which the birds you have at your disposal is fixed, which limits your strategy somewhat.
All in all, though, if you like any sort of physics puzzle game, you’re going to get a lot of enjoyment out of Angry Birds. Even if you don’t typically like these types of games, the gameplay is interesting enough to keep you engaged; even being stuck on a particular level is still fun in its own way, and the early levels are easy enough that you won’t get stuck for a while anyway. Angry Birds is quirky, easy to pick up, and difficult to master, and it’s loads of fun all the way through. Angry Birds is an easy recommendation at its regular $2 price, and a complete no brainer at its current sale price (as of this writing) of $1. Unless, of course, you’re a pig; then you may want to stay away.
Learn more about Angry Birds for iPhone and iPod touch in the App Store
App review: Madden NFL 10
New in iProng Labs: a hands-on review of the new Madden NFL 10 app for iPhone and iPod touch, available for $9.99 in the App Store…
review by Steve Loopipe
If one thing is clear from the caliber of the games appearing on the App Store of late, it’s that the iPhone is becoming a legitimate gaming platform, with big-name developers finally joining the fray of late. Of course, a gaming platform isn’t really a gaming platform until one particular game is made available for it: That game, of course, is Madden. So really, what better time than Apple’s keynote to announce the new, gaming-centric iPod Touch to also announce the release of Madden 10 for the iPhone? Of course, just because a version of Madden exists doesn’t make it a good game, especially at a high-for-the-App Store price of $10. Considering myself a hardcore football fan and occasional Madden consumer, I could hardly wait to find out for myself.
This version of Madden, as one would expect, is fairly stripped down as compared to its console cousins, but that suits the iPhone version just fine as a more casual, pick-up-and-play edition of the game. The only modes available are Play Now, which launches a stand-alone game where you can choose which team to play against, or Season, which simulates a full 16-game season. There are options to adjust rosters (which are slightly out of date having been released before the start of the season), but otherwise, you just launch a game and go. As one would expect, dropping out of the game to take a call or otherwise via the home button auto-saves the game, and the player can pick up right where he left off (and the game launches very quickly, to boot), making playing a full game in several five to ten minute sessions extremely possible. Multiplayer is not available as of this writing, but is promised in a future update.
The controls have been completely reworked for the iPhone Madden, and they work so well that you can sometimes forget that you’re using a virtual d-pad to move your players around. Context-sensitive action buttons appear on the lower right side of the screen, and handle everything except for passing, which is handled by tapping on the receiver (indicated by a circle color-coded to indicate how open he is). Being a casual player of Madden myself, I really like this control scheme even better than I do that of the console versions, since one of the problems I tend to have with Madden is trying to memorize which button controls which action in any given scenario; now they’re all right there on the screen with helpful icons to remind you.
A new addition for the iPhone version is a stopwatch button that activates what EA calls Action Control, which is essentially slow motion. Honestly, the addition of this button alone made this version of Madden much more fun than any other version of the game I’ve played, and I don’t know why it took so long to put it in. Being able to slow the game down helps in all kinds of situations – finding a hole in the defense as a running back, cycling through reads as a QB, switching to the correct receiver and determining which direction to run in as the defense, etc. Obviously, you don’t need this feature – Madden’s gotten along for 15 years without it – but especially if you find the speed of Madden overwhelming, it really makes the game feel much more fair.
The presentation is fairly good as well, given the iPhone’s limitations. Graphics are fairly well done, with reasonable representations of the various stadiums and player models. You won’t have individual faces modeled like you will on the consoles, but that doesn’t detract from the experience at all. More importantly, everything is extremely smooth; through several full games played on my iPod Touch 2G, I never noticed even a small amount of slowdown due to performance issues.
Sound, on the other hand, needs some work. The base background sound is incessant crowd noise that sounds less like cheering and more like static. John Madden and Cris Collinsworth do provide sparse commentary, but it’s repetitive and generic, and more often than not, you get no commentary at all. You can listen to the iPod music in game, but you have to select the music in game, there is no shuffle mode for playlists, and the music overrides all the game sound, including on field sounds and commentary, which is kind of weird the first couple of times you try it.
There’s also the issue of the playbook, which seems too limited for seasoned Madden players but could be overwhelming for beginners. Plays are split into run/blitz, short pass, long pass, and special teams, and while those cover most situations, when you’re looking for a specific type of play, such as a play action pass, it can be difficult to find it lumped among all the other passing plays. That said, most versions of Madden tend to have an Ask Madden mode, which chooses the play automatically for beginners, and that option appears to be missing (or at least well hidden) in the iPhone version. Given how geared the game is toward casual players, this seems to be a fairly glaring omission.
Even despite its faults, though, Madden NFL 10 is a fantastic football game, and the price is extremely fair given the comparison to the full console versions at $60, and especially when compared to the $30 Nintendo DS version. Hardcore Madden players may miss some of the features, but for everyone else with even a passing interest in football or in Madden, this is a no-brainer. If this is the state of gaming on the iPhone as of right now, I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.
Madden NFL 10 is available in the App Store.
App Review: Civilization
August 31, 2009 by Beatweek · 2 Comments
New in iProng Labs: a hands-on review of the newly released Civilization Revolution app for iPhone and iPod touch, priced at $4.99 in the App Store…
review by Steve Loopipe
If you follow the iPhone news sites closely enough. it’s hard to be surprised by anything when it appears on the App Store; between developers eager to announce their new apps and Apple’s ever lengthening review process, you generally have a fair amount of notice in advance. That’s why it was so surprising when I woke up one Monday and found that Civilization Revolution was suddenly available for purchase. “Not that Civilization,” I thought. But yes, in fact, it was an official iPhone version of Civilization, developed by Take Two Games, who developed both Civilization IV for the PC and Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360, Playstation3 and Nintendo DS. I was skeptical that a real Civilization game could work on the iPhone, but I downloaded the Lite version anyway. By that evening, I’d paid for the full version, and while it cost me more than any other app I’ve purchased, I haven’t regretted the decision for a minute.
For the uninitiated, the Civilization (or Civ, as its players typically refer to it) is a long-running series of turn-based strategy games that starts off with a single settlement in ancient times, and allows the player to build the nation up into modern times. You can accomplish this via military conquest, enhancing your civilization’s culture to attract a number of great people to settle in your cities, amassing enough gold to control the world economically, or advancing scientifically to the point where you can send a spaceship to Alpha Centauri.
The iPhone version of Civilization, Civilization Revolution, is based off of the series’ first entry that was specifically designed for consoles as opposed to computers. As a result, experienced Civilization players may find it significantly scaled down as compared to, say, Civilization IV. That said, the scaled back iteration actually suits the iPhone quite well, as it allows the player to get a fairly complete Civilization experience without getting bogged down with the interface, while more advanced options are available for those players who want them. For example, a large part of city management is deciding which tiles around a city will be worked by citizens, as each tile produces either food (which helps a city grow), production (to construct buildings and military units), or trade (to contribute to money or science). The player can choose to place the workers individually, but there are also buttons to simply maximize one of those aspects, which is what a player will want to do 90% of the time, especially when they are first starting out.
This is one of those games that sounds like a really great idea, but would expect to fail in execution. Happily, it turns out that Civ Revolution works pretty well on the iPhone. The game strikes a really nice balance between staying true to the series and staying simple for playability’s sake. Even toward the end of the game, when the full map is revealed and all the competing civilizations have multiple units moving around the map, the game never really feels sluggish, even on the iPod Touch 2G (though playing on a first-gen iPhone or iPod Touch could prove a bit dicier). Not being a hardcore Civ player anymore (though I did spend more hours than I’d like to admit playing Civ II in college), the game depth and length felt perfect for a portable version; games last two to three hours on average, which feels right.
That’s not to say that the game is perfect, however; there are a few problems that, while not enough to discourage me from wanting to play, can be a bit annoying when they crop up. The most annoying is that the game has the tendency to crash, especially toward the late stages of the game. This wouldn’t be quite so bad if it autosaved for you regularly, as opposed to only when you exit out of the game normally (by pressing the home button or quitting to the phone to take a call, for example), but it doesn’t. The game does prompt you to save your game occasionally, but those prompts are few and far between.
Less devastating but equally frustrating is unit movement. If you want to move within a single screen’s worth of terrain, movement is great; you just drag your unit where you want it to go. If you want to send it a long distance away, however, you need to choose “Move Unit” and keep tapping on the edge of the screen until you finally get to your destination. It’s unnecessarily tedious and counter-intuitive, since your natural instinct is to simply drag your finger to the edge of the screen and hold it there as the screen scrolls to where you want to go. One other minor complaint is the lack of multiplayer, which is understandable but still disappointing nonetheless.
All that said, however, Civilization Revolution is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the Civilization series to the very small screen. Even at the game’s original $10 asking price, it would have been one of the few games in the App Store that could justify being that expensive; at its current price of $5, it’s well worth a purchase, especially given that the console versions of the game retail for $20-$30, depending on your system of choice. Just be prepared to set aside some time; it’s true that you can put the game down at any time and pick up later where you left off, but that doesn’t mean you’ll want to.
Civilization Revolution is available for $4.99 in the App Store. Civilization Revolution Lite is available for free in the App Store
