Chillingo iOS Roundup – Volume Five

I know it’s not been that long since the last one, but if there’s one thing I know for certain it’s that Chillingo aren’t going to stop releasing games just because you haven’t finished the last lot that they put out. To that end it’s up to us to tell you what’s out there right now that’s worth your hard earned money. As you’ve come to expect from the publishing giant that is Chillingo, there have been a lot of games released since we last met. As usual, some good and some bad, and a few that only serve a select few people. Today we’re going to talk about four of those games, Anomaly HD, NyxQuest HD, Conan: Tower of the Elephant and Rogue Sky HD all of which are iPad games, but there are iPhone versions out there ready to be played.

Titles are available on iPhone and iPad unless specifically stated otherwise. If you like what you read, click the small black “App Store” button to load iTunes up and purchase the title.

ANOMALY HD:

Think about everything you know about tower defense games. Placing your towers in that perfect spot so that when the enemies do come at you (and they will) you’ll be ready for them. Think about how you’re going to protect that end point, that all those enemies are trying to get into in order to win their own game. Now turn all of that on it’s head and you’ve pretty much got Anomaly HD.

Anomaly HD is best described as a reverse tower defense game, instead of you placing all the towers your enemy is, your only real goal is to get to the end while staying alive. Some missions have little extra things that you’re expected to do along the way but for the most part getting to the end point of the map is your only goal. At first it’s a little difficult to get used to because everything about the game looks and feels (at least at first) like a tower defense title. I even caught myself planning where I was going to place my towers before the match had started only to find my entire plot was useless, I was going to be playing the troops I’d planned on stopping; now I had to outsmart the A.I. Not that tough. Right?

I love the smell of burning sand dunes in the morning

The visuals in Anomaly HD are some of the best on the iPad, short of something like Infinity Blade (which is almost a tech demo in it’s own right), so if you’re looking for something to show off the capabilities of the iPad as a gaming device, while also being a fun game to play, you can stop the search as you’ve found what you’ve been looking for. All of the models in the game have been crafted with care and all of the textures look as good as a lot of PC games that are currently on the market. The models are generally of a low polygon count but the developers have done a great job with the limitations of their engine, enough so that most people won’t be able to notice much at all to complain about. The introduction video alone will be enough to get most people foaming at the mouth and wanting more, and the game certainly provides that.

If you’re looking for a game that has great gameplay, plenty of features, stunning visuals and plenty of replay value then you don’t have to look any further than Anomaly HD. On top of being a stunning looking game it has also got the privilege of being one of the most original games out there at the moment. We’ve all seen the standard tower defense games, it’s about time we saw something a little different, something with a little bit of a twist on a standard genre, and Anomaly HD is that game. I have no difficulty whatsoever in recommending that everybody who has an iPad, and who enjoys puzzle games in general, tower defense or not, should buy this game as soon as you can. You won’t regret it.

NYXQUEST HD:

If there’s one story that almost everybody knows, it’s the story of Icarus. About how he flew too close to the sun, accidentally melted his wax wings and fell back down to earth. The part of the story that’s never told is the story of Nyx, the girl Icarus spent his time in the air seeing. What happened to her once Icarus wasn’t able to fly any more? Could they even continue to see each other? NyxQuest HD is the game that attempts to answer that question that burns within each of us…well some of us…OK maybe just me and the developers but still, here’s the answer you may never have asked for anyway.

NyxQuest HD is a side scrolling adventure game, one of those games with a left arrow, a right arrow and a jump button, and that’s it. Nothing special, no complicated button combinations that you’re expected to learn just to do a simple task, master the jump button and you’re done for the most part. After a little while within the game you’ll be given a few more things to do, for example you’ll be able to drag an item across the screen, or up from the sand, just by dragging it with your finger on the iPad’s touch screen. This method of control along with the additional touch features all seems very intuitive and pretty much anybody will be able to pick them up quickly without much trouble at all. The only real difficulty comes from the innate problems with on-screen buttons. Sometimes they’re a little less responsive than most people would expect, often resulting in the death of the title character, but it’s not enough to stop people playing the game, it just adds a layer of frustration that the game could really have done without.

All Zeus wants is help out of the sand and people keep jumping on his hand!

The visuals of NyxQuest HD are quite appealing, they’re certainly not the best graphics available on the iPad and personally, I would have preferred the hand drawn animation style of the introduction video, but they’re not bad in the long run. The biggest problem with the way the game looks on the whole is that a lot of it gets very repetitive, very quickly. There’s a lot of sand and a lot of rocks, and the scenery doesn’t change often enough to keep it fresh for the player. This ultimately means that most players will only play it for short periods of time because if they played it for longer than 20–30 minutes at a time they’d almost certainly get fed up of the same background scrolling across the back of the screen for the fifteenth time. Other than the repetitive nature of a lot of the scenery however, the visuals could have been a lot worse.

All in all NyxQuest HD is a game that’s worth playing, but there are a lot more games out there that deserve to be played first. The story is really appealing, especially for someone who has an interest in historical legends such as the story of Icarus, and it’s always fun to see a company take stories we all know and love and turn them on their head to give us something original. The controls, along with the ability to touch items on the screen in order to manipulate them, help to make the entire game really easy to get into for almost anyone. Pick it up for two minutes and you’ll find yourself playing for longer than you initially intended or until you get bored of seeing the same background over and over.

CONAN: TOWER OF THE ELEPHANT:

If you’re a fan of 80’s movies, or even the new remake that’s just been released in the cinemas, then you may be aware that a new iOS game has just come onto the App Store based around the famous character of Conan. Published by our good friends over at Chillingo and developed by Moyo Studios, Conan: Tower of the Elephant is a third person isometric hack and slash game that uses on-screen control methods to control the title character as well as some quirky little unique features.

Conan: Tower of the Elephant is very similar to the plethora of other isometric 3rd person hack and slash games on the iPad, move around using an on screen control stick on the left hand side of the device’s screen and attack using your right hand. The difference in Conan: Tower of the Elephant is that instead of an attack button the player is given a display which they can draw on with their thumb. If the player uses this area to draw a line that goes from left to right and then right to left, that’s what Conan will do with his sword, slashing it from left to right then right to left. This gives the control scheme of Conan: Tower of the Elephant a little bit of originality when compared against the other games of the genre but doesn’t stop the on screen control method from being severely lacking.

Take that! You graphically mediocre yet eerily similar to the last guy soldier!

Conversely to what I said about Anomaly HD earlier, Conan: Tower of the Elephant has some of the worst graphics I’ve seen on the iPad. When I first loaded up the game I thought I had to wait around a little while for the textures of the characters and buildings to load. After about five minutes of waiting to for everything to load it became apparent that what I was looking at was the game after everything had loaded, it was the best I was going to get; disappointed is an understatement. All of the visuals within the game are dull and lack any kind of decent texturing and the models are crudely modeled, even the title character lacks any real definition to make him look any different from the other characters in the world. All in all, everything after the main menu screen looks like it was rushed through development and no real time was spent on polishing it at all, resulting in a game that, visually at least, still looks unfinished.

All things considered, it’s difficult to recommend Conan: Tower of the Elephant to anyone, even people that enjoy hack and slash games on the iPad. The controls are as good as any when it comes to on-screen analog sticks, and the addition of giving the player the option to draw on a second area of the screen in order to control Conan’s sword swipes is a good idea, and quite original, but unfortunately it doesn’t work well, often resulting in Conan performing large movements that take entirely too long to complete and that end up being frustrating instead of entertaining. If you’re looking for a good 3rd person hack and slash game for the iPad then keep looking, because Conan: Tower of the Elephant isn’t the game you’re looking for.

ROGUE SKY HD:

Rogue Sky HD is a very simple game developed by PebbleBug Studios where the main objective is to get to the top of the stage. Sounds simple right? For the most part it is, but the difficulty lies in the fact that there are a multitude of objects littering the stage that you’re supposed to avoid. Failing to do so will cause the hot air balloon that you’re controlling to burst into flames and fall, not so gracefully, back down to earth.

In Rogue Sky HD you control a hot air balloon using a pair of on screen buttons, one on the left of the screen and the other on the right. These buttons control whether the hot air balloon will go up and to the left, or up and to the right; pressing them both simultaneously will cause the balloon to go straight upwards. This control method uses the on screen buttons in a way that always feels natural and is very easy to pick up and play, even for somebody who doesn’t play video games all that often. When it comes to iPad games it’s always good to have a control scheme that’s very intuitive, and Rogue Sky HD accomplishes that feat with ease. The only difficult part about the current control scheme of Rogue Sky HD is that the game itself feels like it should be played using the tilt functionality of the iDevice it’s being played on. Most people will be tilting the device anyway without even thinking about it so adding it as a supported method of play would have been a nice little addition.

I'm not sure what's stranger, the Spider-Man blimp or the shark-esque hot air balloon

Rogue Sky HD is a relatively decent looking game but there are certainly better looking iPad titles out there. If you decide to get Rogue Sky HD you won’t be buying it for the visuals though, you’ll be getting it for the gameplay and, in that respect, you’ll be getting your money’s worth. The graphics, for the most part, look half way between being just the normal style of visuals we’re used to and slightly cell shaded. The slightly cell shaded look of the clouds as well as the explosion help to give the entire game a more fantastical feel and while not being the best looking, certainly does a good job at maintaining the general feel of the game and in some cases, adding to it. You couldn’t ask for more from a game.

If you’re a fan of games that test your ability to accurately control a vehicle down to the most minute movements then you’re going to love Rogue Sky HD. There’s plenty of levels to play with along with the usual three stars that we’re so used to seeing by now. You could just move on to the next level after clearing the stage and you’d definitely enjoy the game that way, but could you keep going knowing that one of the previous levels isn’t entirely finished? Rogue Sky HD is a must-buy for people that enjoy quirky little games that test your motor skills, just be sure that if you have the choice, you play it on the iPad; the bigger screen certainly helps navigating through those tighter spots you’ll inevitably find yourself in.

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