The jumping, blasting, and exploring is compelling stuff, which is just as well, because this is a big game, with hundreds of sprawling levels, 11 bosses, and stints where you temporarily control a psychotic ninja bear.
Hoggy 2 is a platform puzzler, with a firm emphasis on the puzzling. Within each jar is a room filled with platforms, enemies, hazards, and fruit. Eat all the fruit and you get a key.
Get enough keys and you can venture further into the maze. The snag is that getting at the fruit can be tricky. Our favorite free iPad logic tests, path-finding challenges, bridge builders, and turn-based puzzlers. Puzzle Dino - Egg Adventure features a stompy dinosaur with a thing for eggs. In each single-screen level, you place a limited number of directional arrows and other objects. Hit play and the prehistoric protagonist will scoot along, as directed by the tiles.
Fortunately, the effect is more relaxing than ponderous, with Puzzle Dino adding a hints system to help you along if you get stuck. Tile Snap is a match game. But unlike in Bejeweled, matched elements are never replaced. Each level is therefore a puzzle, to be completed in a strict order, working your brain rather than only your swiping digit. Said levels are constructed from tiles that pleasingly flip when dragged. This is a premium experience, with beautifully responsive, tactile controls, and cleverly designed, hand-crafted levels.
Yet there are no ads, and IAPs only exist for optional hints. Dream Detective is all about hidden objects. The scenes are varied, with early examples including riffs on famous movies, and comic book pages. Kubrix sits part way between puzzler, meditative experience, and plain weird. First, the puzzling: this involves linking the center of the puzzle to square nodes, often although not always situated towards its edges.
To achieve your goal, you rotate patterned sections of the puzzle, aiming to create unbroken pathways. What really sells the game is its strange presentation. The center of the puzzle creepily beats like a heart, and other sound effects include mechanical scrapes and gruesome squelches. Usually, each member would help the others survive. But as you reach the later dungeons, figuring out the precise order in which to dispatch your colleagues — and precisely how to do so — can be a serious challenge.
The black humor is appealing, as your ranger leaps on a cross-eyed mage pinned to the wall, before doing a little dance on reaching the exit.
But the mechanic also freshens up what could otherwise have just been yet another entry in the single-screen puzzler sub-genre. Sky: Children of the Light is a multiplayer online adventure. Created by the brains behind console classic Journey, Sky is a visually dazzling game, which often finds your winged protagonist gliding above lush landscapes and skidding down hillsides.
Your aim is to spread hope through a kingdom by returning fallen stars to the skies. This means plenty of exploration to find objects that unlock further progress. Most puzzles barring your way are quite simple, but they often require the help of friends — temporary or permanent — you can make in-game. From the eye-popping visuals to the smartly conceived social interactions, Sky is a must-install.
The gameplay primarily involves tilting a play area comprising square blocks. The aim is to nurse a trundling square to an exit, grabbing pick-ups along the way. Fall over an edge and the entire level flips accordingly. Similarly, you can leap to a ceiling to turn everything upside down. As you progress, routes become increasingly labyrinthine.
All this plays out alongside a gorgeous old-school CRT aesthetic, which feels perfectly at home on the TV-like display of an iPad. Top stuff. Ilu is a puzzler that wants you to illuminate the darkness with a combination of lights and logic. A light can be placed anywhere on the board, at which point beams head vertically and horizontally until they reach a wall. What complicates matters is, in a ruleset vaguely reminiscent of Minesweeper, the board has nodes that indicate how many lights must be placed next to that point.
Put too many lights by a node, or shine two lights into each other, and a yellow energy bar starts turning red. Too much red and all your lights fizzle out. Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle is a sliding puzzler with lashings of gore. Set broadly in the world of Friday the 13th, it features horror icon Jason Voorhees on a mission to chop up anyone in his immediate vicinity. That might sound horrific, but Killer Puzzle is more South Park than splatter flick. The chunky visuals present everyone as colorful but gormless cartoon characters, and the more bloody and ridiculous cut scenes can be skipped entirely.
You start each bout surrounded by weapon-wielding foes eager to take your head off. Double-tap one and you almost instantly appear before them, for a swift bit of ultra-violence. But then enemies get their turn.
Assuming you can deal with liberal amounts of videogame blood being sprayed about, A Way To Slay is an excellent puzzler.
There's not a lot of originality in King Rabbit , but it's one of those simple and endearing puzzle games that sucks you in and refuses to let go until you've worked your way through the entire thing.
The premise is hackneyed — bunnies have been kidnapped, and a sole hero must save them. And the gameplay is familiar too, where you leap about a grid-like landscape, manipulating objects, avoiding hazards, finding keys, unlocking doors, and reaching a goal. But the execution is such that King Rabbit is immediately engaging, while new ideas keep coming as you work through the dozens of puzzles. Pleasingly, the game also increases the challenge so subtly that you barely notice — until you realise you've been figuring out a royal bunny's next moves into the wee small hours.
Time travel weirdness meets the morning rush hour in Does Not Commute. You get a short story about a character, and guide their car to the right road. Only the next character's car must be dealt with while avoiding the previous one. And the next. Before long, you're a dozen cars in and weaving about like a lunatic, desperately trying to avoid a pile-up.
For free, you get the entire game, but with the snag that you must always start from scratch, rather than being able to use checkpoints that appear after each zone.
Everything is stripped back, and so steering around the futuristic courses is automatic; however, getting past obstacles does require very careful use of throttle and balance controls.
Although races are ultimately about getting to the checkered flag first avoiding the many spikes and lasers racing in the future apparently mandates , Gravity Rider Zero is a free iPad game that's primarily about finesse. You must learn the nuances of each course, in order to succeed. Sometimes, this is fiddly — and occasionally maddening. Pico Rally is a high-octane racer controlled with a single thumb.
In short, hold down on the screen, and you get a burst of speed; raise your digit and you slow down a bit. Steering is taken care of, and so victory is about learning the twists and turns in each circuit, and not losing speed by smashing into barriers and other cars, or grinding across the dirt.
Data Wing is a speedy but elegant neon-clad top-down racer. The racing bit is superb as you pilot your tiny craft, scraping track edges for boosts of speed during time trials. New challenges are slowly unlocked, such as races, and levels that flip everything on it side, pitting you against gravity and forcing you to use boost pads to reach a high-up exit. A simple two-thumb control system ensures the game works brilliantly on every size of iPad, and as game and story alike unfold there are plenty of surprises in store.
But perhaps the biggest is that a production this polished is entirely free. Get it! Asphalt 9: Legends is a brash arcade racer with such a scant regard for physics and reality it almost makes its bonkers predecessor look like a simulation.
Nitro-boosting through skyscraper windows! Playing chicken with massive trains! Like all Asphalt games, this one scrapes a key along its pristine bodywork in the form of IAP and grind; also, some players may be irked by a default control scheme that has you swipe and tap to time actions rather than actually steer.
But despite its shortcomings, Asphalt 9: Legends remains a glorious and compelling oddball arcade racer. MMX Hill Dash 2 is a one-on-one monster truck racer, with tracks akin to roller coasters, full of unlikely peaks and crazy dips. At first, this makes for an off-putting experience. But grab vehicle upgrades and properly plan how to tackle a track, and you start making progress. The game then becomes strangely absorbing — almost puzzle-like as you gradually figure out the choreography and upgrades required to crack a track.
Carmageddon is in theory a racing game, but is really more a demolition derby set in a grim dystopia where armored cars smash each other to bits and drivers gleefully mow down ambling pedestrians and cows. You may not be surprised to hear it ended up banned in several countries when originally released on PC back in These days, though, its low-res over-the-top feel seems more cartoonish than gory — and the freeform driving is a lot of fun.
The maps are huge, the physics is bouncy, and your opponents are an odd mix of braindead and psychotic. Vertigo Racing is a sort-of rally game.
Instead, the game does the steering for you, leaving you merely able to prod the accelerator or slam on the brakes, to stop your car plunging into the abyss. This transforms the game into a decidedly oddball take on slot racing, reimagined as a roller-coaster. Or possibly the other way around. Still, the upgrade path is smart with a generous dishing out of virtual coins to upgrade your cars and buy new tracks , making for hours of grin-inducing arcade action.
You pick a car and barrel about a little wraparound city, driving around like a maniac, until your inevitable arrest. SWAT vans will hurl themselves at your vehicle, oblivious to the carnage around them. Instead of blazing through larger-than-life takes on real-world cities, Asphalt Xtreme takes you off-road, zooming through dunes, drifting across muddy flats, and generally treating the great outdoors in a manner that will win you no favors with the local authorities.
As per other entries in the series, this is ballsy arcade racing, with bouncy physics, simple controls, an obsession with boosting, and tracks designed to make you regularly smash your car to bits. Salvagette upends the bullet hell shooter genre by having games play out in turn-based fashion and — from the point of view of your craft — removing the shooting. An odd prospect, then, but one that works magnificently on the larger screen of an iPad.
Each level finds you darting about a grid, aiming to ram every enemy into oblivion. Along with some fruity language be warned , it features a little girl with serious firepower who needs to rid her world of enemy swarms. The controls take a bit of getting used to. You tap to move, hold down to charge your weapon, and then let go to fire, optionally dragging your finger to direct electricity.
The aim is to blast everything else off of the screen, in what comes across as half arena shooter Robotron; Geometry Wars and half sumo wrestling. PewPew Live is a rarity on modern iPads: a frenetic twin-stick shooter. These days, not so much. But like classic arcade fare, mastery is possible and feels wonderful when achieved. On iPad, you can customize the control placement and the game dazzles on the large display, resembling a modern take on classic vector arcade games.
Sonar Smash is a simple retro-inspired vertically-scrolling blaster. At first, you might surmise it would be better suited to an iPhone, but this shooter really does demand the larger display of an iPad. You slide a finger from left to right to direct a dolphin, and tap with your other hand to emit deadly sonar blasts. A thumb tap on the bottom-right unleashes special weapons.
Through avoiding the autofire usually associated with mobile shooters of this ilk, Sonar Smash demands more strategy and precision regarding shots you place. However, its zen vibe also makes it entertaining and approachable rather than impenetrable for newcomers.
Taking a cue from the original hit, Recharged finds your bases fending off an endless barrage of inward-bound missiles. You tap to launch counterstrikes, aiming to take down multiple projectiles with single explosions. Fans of the original may gripe about changes that have robbed the game of nuance, such as the lack of silo selection and multiple levels. Banana Kong Blast somewhat brazenly riffs off of the bits in Donkey Kong Country where you use barrels to blast an outsized ape through the air.
But what it perhaps lacks in originality, Banana Kong Blast makes up for in polish and fun. On the iPad, the cartoonish visuals look great as you tap the screen to send your ape soaring and, if you mistime things, plummeting , aiming to grab as many bananas as possible along the way. The canned nature of this free iPad game might eventually pall, but the 3D visuals and varied scenes make for as much single-digit monkeying around fun as you can conceivably pack into an iPad.
HELI is an arena shooter that is thin on story but big on blasting. You weave left and right, your guns automatically aiming and blasting the opposition to bits. But around the tenth of levels, the pace ramps up. Suddenly, the arena walls start rapidly closing in, and enemies spew more bullets than is entirely necessary.
Rather than a side-on view as you catapult deranged birds at ramshackle buildings barely shielding kleptomaniac swine, you get a first-person viewpoint. From then on, you get a new perspective many, in fact on your bird-flinging antics; you can explore levels from every angle, looking to set up shots that will hit sneakily hidden boxes of TNT for maximum destruction. Piffle is another entry in an expanding sub-genre of shooters. You blast a string of ricocheting bullets at bricks, until the numbers on said bricks run down, causing them to explode.
As you gather more ammunition and powers, things become entertainingly chaotic, your screen becoming a sea of ammo and explosions. Here, said ammo appears to be limbless, bouncy cats, which face off against encroaching walls of smiling blocks.
Because levels are finite, you can approach each one in strategic fashion. There is some grind, with later levels being very tough to complete without power-ups. Fortnite parachutes players on to an island, with the simple task of being the last person standing.
Over time, the area in which players can survive shrinks, at which point you might consider building a defensive fortress. The mix of building, scavenging, exploration and action mixes perfectly to create unique scenarios within every game, and the game is kept fresh with regular content updates.
Shadowgun Legends gives you a big, dumb, brash first-person shooter for your iPad. No, really. Each level finds your baby dragon zooming about hilly landscapes packed with castles and tunnels, roasting guards and grabbing coins. This all makes for an interesting combination, enabling deliriously fast zooming about and violence across the tiny worlds, but precision when you need it. But Evil Factory is just warming up, and subsequently revels in flinging all manner of mutated madness your way in its hard-nosed top-down arcade battles.
For each, you dart about using a virtual joystick, while two large on-screen buttons activate weapons. Unfortunately, your bosses are colossal idiots, and have armed you with the likes of dynamite and Molotov cocktails.
Bouts often therefore involve dodging bullets to fling wares at a giant foe, before running away like a coward. With Darkside Lite , you rather generously get the entire arcade mode from superb blaster Darkside. What this means is a slew of fast-paced and eye-dazzling shooty action, where you blast everything around you to pieces, while trying very hard to stay in one piece yourself. In a marked departure from the impressive Phoenix HD and its procedurally generated bullet hell, Phoenix II shoves you through set-piece vertically scrolling shoot 'em up grinders.
Every 24 hours, a new challenge appears, tasking you with surviving a number of waves comprising massive metal space invaders belching hundreds of deadly bullets your way. A single hit to your craft's core a small spot at its center brings destruction, forcing you to memorize attack and bullet patterns and make use of shields and deflectors if you've any hope of survival.
You do sometimes slam into a brick wall, convinced a later wave is impossible to beat. To lessen the frustration, there's always the knowledge you'll get another crack at smashing new invaders the following day.
Regardless, this is a compelling, dazzling and engaging shooter for iPad. We imagine the creators of Smash Hit really hate glass. Look at it, sitting there with its stupid, smug transparency, letting people see what's on the other side of it.
Smash it all! Preferably with ball-bearings while flying along corridors! And that's Smash Hit — fly along, flinging ball-bearings, don't hit any glass face-on, and survive for as long as possible. Golf Skies is far from the first mobile game to do weird things with golf - and not even the first to reimagine it as whacking a ball between islands floating in the sky. You fire your ball into the heavens, Angry Birds-style, and then use directional buttons to adjust its path.
A timer dictates how long it can stay airborne, and planetoids exert gravitational pull as you weave your way to the hole. On the iPad, the large display makes it easier to plot winding pathways and avoid obstacles, and the visuals look lovely. Smart course design and multiple high-score targets shots and speed further propel Golf Skies toward the top of the leaderboard. Super Over! Here, you chase a total from a limited number of balls. A cricket bat zooms back and forth, and tapping the screen stops it on a number or the dreaded W.
The breakneck pace extends brilliantly to a same-device two-player mode. There, you and a friend battle it out, one bowling while the other bats. Successfully putt, and the ball shrinks a little so you can continue your oddball golfing quest. Grow in the Hole is visually crude, but gets things right in the gameplay stakes. Golf Blitz is a side-on crazy golf game, with you racing to the hole against online competition.
A spiritual sequel to the highly lauded Super Stickman Golf titles, the courses here are far from standard fare, often comprising levitating islands, or trap-laden caverns linked by narrow tunnels.
Power-ups can help — and unsportingly blast rival balls away by way of a grenade or rocket-powered super ball. The game is centred around swapping coloured gems. The game modes in the previous generations are followed in the game with some added twists that takes your experience on a different level. The quality of music and the graphics has been improved massively that adds to the fun in the game. Bad Piggies Gam Cut The Rope. Lift up gem-filled Clouds and drop them into different sections of the board to create explosive cascades.
Rescue floating butterflies before they escape into the sky. With just one tap, you can fly through the sky to check out your friends. Want to see how your skills stack up?
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