Android – Iphone – Applications

Ahh the trusty tower defense game – the genre that you fully intend to indulge in for mere minutes, until hours have passed and you’ve realised your battery is nearly drained. It’s tough to innovate within the genre though and admittedly Diet Defense has gone the easy route, sticking to its predictable guns while still being enjoyable.

One thing that is pretty unique about Diet Defense is its storyline. You’re not protecting your house from zombies this time round nor saving the world – you’re saving your gut. A wealth of tasty but unhealthy treats are coming your way while you’re slumped in your living room desperately trying to stick to your diet. It’s down to a trusty team of healthy snacks like tomatoes, pumpkins, onions and oranges to protect you from the temptation of donuts.

The typical tower defense pattern follows. You have a set amount of money in which to spend on your initial soldiers (or in this case – fruit and veg) and as you destroy the enemies/tasty treats, more money is gained meaning you can buy more troops. You can also place the fruit and veg strategically so that the donuts and pizza are diverted into a path that you choose. As time goes on and you accrue more money, you can upgrade your fruit and veg so that they become that bit more powerful.

There are four different battle arenas to compete in and three different difficulty levels on offer, spanning easy, medium and hard. There’s also an endless mode if you feel like playing for extended periods.

Diet Defense is quite fun but it doesn’t really offer anything new to the tower defense genre. There’s GameCenter and OpenFeint functionality which offer leaderboards and achievements, extending the longevity a bit. Really though, Diet Defense is just like any other tower defense game albeit with a healthy message behind it. Still, it’s very cheap so you could do a lot worse.

[ Diet Defense Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by husain \\ tags: $0.99, Application, diet defense, Games, genre, healthy, house, overall-rating, rating, time, tower

Is it a tower defense game or an action platformer? Well, it’s a tower defense game, that’s slightly anticlimactic. What Monster Feed does different than the rest of the genre is add some needed tempo, forcing you to stay alert rather than doze off between waves 14 and 25.

First though, I have to mention that the basic premise of Monster Feed is much like any other tower defense game out there. There is a fixed path, a set number of enemy waves, and a bunch of towers that can be upgraded twice. If you’ve ever played The Creeps you’ll know what to expect from these kind of basics. The real challenge in the game comes from the spell tree, which speeds the game up quite a bit. As you play, the enemies that you kill drop money for towers and mana to cast spells. These spells can be upgraded along with the towers, but can range from instant use fireballs and evil arrows to short term units such as fixed space arrow shooting blobs and roaming critters, reminiscent of The Langoliers.

The real trick to the game is that it doesn’t give you enough money to beat the levels with towers alone, so you actively have to be pumping out spells to win. Unlike other tower defense games, if you sit back and do nothing for a minute or two you are toast. The spells play such a central role in the game that there is a whole game mode available that basically forces you to win with only spells, giving you enough money throughout to maybe build a tower or two.

Monster Feed is certainly different than other tower defense games, and the change of pace isn’t a bad thing at all. If you love the genre as it is but need a bit of spark in your life, be sure to pick up Monster Feed today. You won’t regret it.

[ Monster Feed Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by pietro842 \\ tags: Application, beat-the-levels, entertainment, Game, genre, life, review, tower, tower defense

Tower Defense games, whether you like them or not, are about as ingrained in iPhone lore as it can get. Since the whopping success of Fieldrunners, countless tower defense games have popped into the store… some good and some not so good.

Epic War TD certainly isn’t in the not so good area, but it definitely isn’t in the top tier of the genre. Starting the game, it looks like a slightly more complex version of a typical fixed path tower defense game. The basics are all there, such as the standard waves of enemies, a fairly typical unit tree (machine gun cannon, missile tower, laser tower, slow tower, etc.), and money that is dished out for unit kills, but Epic War gets a little fancy with the rest.

The most difficult thing to understand about Epic War TD is the strange enemy resistance tree. By hitting a little inconspicuous button that looks like a target, you see a huge screen overlay with all the enemies and their resistances to different towers. Instead of just giving towers set amounts of damage dealt, each enemy unit takes damage differently. The obvious goal of the developers is to make each wave count, forcing you to really pick what you build and upgrade (the tower upgrade tree is quite extensive) between each wave. The problem that you run into is that the resistance tree is all organized by enemy unit picture, and it’s not exactly easy to tell the enemy units apart. All of them resemble each other, making is frustrating to really plan things out. For the record, the idea of enemy resistance is solid, but its implementation is sloppy, making the game look less polished than it could.

Also tough is the difficulty, which is extremely tough. Like other tower defense games, Epic war starts you with a set number of units that you can let get through, but that number is all you get for the entire game. There are only four levels to get through, but the levels are really set up for you to fail. For example, level two, even on the medium difficulty, doesn’t give you enough starting money to perfect. No matter what you do, you will get tagged with 5-10+ units getting through, and that is frustrating. To counter this, each level you beat gives you the option to play a little minigame to give you some lives, but the minigame really just distracts from the game itself, and could probably be eliminated altogether.

It goes without saying (again) that certain parts of Epic War TD were frustrating, but it does get quite a bit right. The tech tree really is well done, the weapons are all well thought out and function well, and the enemies (other than their bland appearance) are well thought out. Epic War TD just lacks a level of polish and balance that differentiate it from the genre heavyweights. The developers promise big updates in the future (more levels, retina display updates), but as is it will probably only cater to the most hardcore tower defense fans.

[ Epic War TD is a post from 148Apps ]

written by icegary1101 \\ tags: amt games, Application, enemies, Games, genre, Iphone, making-the-game, overall-rating, rating, resistance, resistances, tower, tower defense, unit

In case you are wondering, Stenches is Trenches with zombies instead of Germans. Having not played Trenches a ton, my time with Stenches was much like hanging out with a long lost girlfriend that moved away far too soon: it’s fun for a time, but then you realize why you weren’t so upset when she originally left.

Stenches lives in the side scrolling castle defense/attack genre that is populated by such titles as Trenches and Epic War 3. The basic concept is to build a bunch of units to fortify/advance your lines while fending off the waves of zombies that are approaching from the right. As you kill zombies, you get gold that you can spend on new troops or ballistic weapons that can strike the zombies from long range. The goal, much like a WW1 battle, is to advance your army to nearby trenches that not only provide shelter, but can be upgraded to become a troop spawn point.

Sales of the game, and its mass popularity, surely come from the polished exterior and likable characters. There are no NPC’s to speak of, but the troop units all have a likability that isn’t matched in the genre. The battlefield, zombies, heck, even the battle sounds in the game are all extremely well made… often sucking you back in after you are determined to stop playing.

Once you get past the polish though, the game quickly shows off its true colors. There are a few issues that I have with the basic game play, and most of the issues come down to frustrating troop movement. First off, the movement in Stenches is all done by line drawing, just draw a little line to tell a unit where you want it to go. This is a great implementation of the touch screen, but when you have 5 units standing in the same spot, what do you do? This problem comes to light primarily when you are advancing your lines to a new trench. To add difficulty, Stenches puts a troop limit in the trenches, and the only way to raise this limit is to upgrade the trench with an engineer. Singling out the engineer for movement is a pain in the rear, and protecting him is even worse. It would make sense to protect your hard-at-work engineer with a few machine gun units, but in the heat of battle when you are moving the units to the trenches their horrible AI will overshoot the trench and blow their cover. Needless to say, there badly needs to be an “advance to next bunker button,” in addition to the regular advance gesture.

My other squabbles come down to the maddening lack of hand to hand combat strength and the unfortunate low max troop count, but the movement issues are by far the most frustrating. Do these issues mean that Stenches is a bad game? No, but it’s hard not to think that the game could be much much better with a few of the kinks worked out. As is, it is a worthy buy if you love the genre or are a fan of Trenches… just be ready for some frustration.

[ Stenches Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by spokoloko \\ tags: castle defense, Games, genre, lines, stenches, stenches-review, thunder game works, time

Fishermen should be excited, but the rest of us? Okay. Yes. The rest of us should be excited too. Never thought I’d be saying that about a fishing game, yeesh.

Fishing Kings HD represents possibly the most comprehensive and well done title within the genre for the iOS platform. There’s three selectable characters, a bevy of upgradeable equipment, a ton of species to fish and several locations to do the fishing in. For sheer variety and longevity, Fishing Kings HD should be mounted over anyone’s mantle.

On the iPad especially, the game looks great. The water is well done, the scenery is believable and the fish themselves are the highlight. The fishing characters are a bit blocky to be completely passable, but they’re only present during pre-cast and measuring moments.

Sparing that, the only major hiccup where presentation is concerned comes from the sometimes dodgey fish models. When the lure has been cast, players are given a view of the lure in the water to attract fish. When trying to find a specific fish to catch, players may take some time to study the environment. That gives the game a chance to get weird. Fish start popping in and out of the space, swimming straight through rocks and walls and completely passing through other fish. The game’s inability to properly portray a collision for the fish robs the underwater thrill of some of its potential glory.

The gameplay is simple enough to be consistently approachable. Touch the screen to select a cast location, flick the device, reel by spinning the reel icon on the left, tug to give the line a tug and then flick the device again to catch the fish. Guess what… that’s it. And, perhaps this is the core fault of every game of this genre. The process of fishing is exceptionally formulaic. The actual catching of fish becomes extremely boring and routine pretty quickly.

Gameloft works hard to compensate this fact by giving players so much other stuff to tinker with. A PDA gives fisher-people new missions and allows them to enter new tournaments. Players will need to choose a proper lure for the fish they’re after. The customization and patient casting is the majority of the fun to be had here. Catching fish, again, becomes almost robotic. It’s everything else players do in order to catch the fish that makes Fishing Kings stand out.

Fishing fans need Fishing Kings. Simply put. For everyone else that’s every been tempted by the genre, this game marks a perfectly casual and deep entry into the pack of all that’s available. It is the best fishing game available in the App Store.

[ Fishing Kings HD Review is a post from 148Apps ]

written by Debra \\ tags: Application, catch-the-fish, device, device-reviewed, environment, fishing, fishing games, fishing-kings, Game, Games, genre, ipad, lure, rating, space