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Games have been aping Indiana Jones since Raiders of the Lost Ark burst into the cinema in 1981, but few execute on their vision as well as Relic Rush — a retro-styled one-touch game of racing through dungeons and tombs in search of treasure.
It’s pretty light on depth, but it’s so well made and cleverly conceived as to be a glorious distraction worthy of the hour or two time investment.
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There’s something strangely cathartic about watching cute cartoony animals marching off to their doom, oblivious to the dangers that lie ahead. Lemmings was great not just for its level design and presentation but also for the way in which its blissfully ignorant critters were always mere seconds from annihilation.
EliteWare’s debut Android game, The Penguin Trials, harks back to this Amiga masterpiece with helpless penguins that need guidance from a higher power to herd them safely from igloo to flag pole. It’s far from perfect, but the quirky concept and clever level design make Penguin Trials a worthy test of your time.
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Blowing up cartoony worms is more fun than it sounds. Team17’s Worms series exploded onto the PC gaming scene in 1995, adding a touch of Lemmings-esque dark humor to the formula of taking turns to shoot projectiles at an opponent across a deformable landscape.
The cute little critters wasted little time after conquering the Amiga, expanding to several other platforms and a franchise with more than a dozen entries. Now they’ve set their sights on Android with the excellent Worms 2: Armageddon. And the good news is that the series is intact and just as compelling on mobile.
Mobile gaming, as you probably know, is super popular: people play games on mobile. Because of that, there are tons of games for Android; they even have their own section in the Play Store, completely separate from “Apps.” I have my select crop of games, as I’m sure you do. I prefer 2D side-scrollers — they are simple, somewhat mindless games that help me pass the time. However, when I came across Draw a Stickman I was pretty intrigued. It didn’t seem like your run of the mill adventure game, so I downloaded it and gave it a try. What did I think? Let’s take a look!
The best puzzle games are elegant, simple, and challenging all at once. Tetris, Drop7, Bejeweled, Peggle, and Picross all share this quality, testing your ability and working your brain no matter whether you’re a total newbie or a seasoned expert.
Abstract Connect Four lookalike 7×7 does an admirable job emulating these classics in an innovative and visually-polished package, but it falls at the last hurdle. It hooks you instantly and holds your interest, yet never quite captures the magic you expect it to.
I’m loving the current trend of old games getting polished up and ported to new platforms. It exposes new audiences to ideas that maybe don’t get the due they deserve nowadays, dishes out nostalgia to fans of the original, and explores how old-school gaming can adapt to the pick-up-and-play modern world.
But it’s not often one of my old favorites gets a reboot. Galactic conquest game Spaceward Ho! was a mainstay on the Mac in the 90s, burning through five major revisions over 13 years and helping pave the way for the likes of Mater of Orion and Gazillionaire, and now it’s been resurrected for Android. Let’s see how classic holds up.
The Simpsons is one of the most widely popular animated TV shows in the world, and when Simpsons Tapped Out was available on iOS devices at the start of 2012, I couldn’t wait for the app to come to Android too. At the time, there were rumors about a release date but all seemed to be false. It wasn’t until February 2013 that Android users got the game they’d been waiting for — it was only a year late…
In Simpsons Tapped Out, you send characters away to do specific tasks and a few hours later you’ll gain a reward. Being grind-based, the game isn’t essentially suited for players who want to engage continuously for long periods of time. However, fans of the show are bound to be thrilled. Simpsons Tapped Out mimics perfectly the TV show and its characters, and has so far attracted a huge amount of players. Read on to find out more…
There’s more than one way to skin a city-building game. The delightful Triple Town already showed the world that the basic gameplay concepts and the core mechanics of SimCity could be distilled into a turn-based puzzle game. Now MegaCity tackles the genre, boasting a “Tetris meets SimCity” hook that turns your city into a never-ending carousel of urbanization.
It’s fun, clever, challenging, and original, but the reliance on a luck-based building queue holds MegaCity back from utter brilliance. Let’s take a look.
Games have a knack for making boring, dull, or difficult tasks seem fun and interesting. They engage players, rather than putting them to sleep, and make it easier to learn through action and experimentation.
Light-Bot, which started life as a web game but is now available for Android, serves as a brilliant introduction to programming. It teaches logic through puzzles that require you to guide a robot through a level by writing step-by-step instructions for its movement. And it’s fun to boot.
