iOS Reviews

Puzzle Agent 2

I’m in two minds about Puzzle Agent 2. On the one hand, it’s a great game in its own right, a true-to-the-original sequel in every possible aspect to one of the most innovative and creative games I’ve played on the iOS platform.

On the other hand, it’s exactly all of those things. Let me explain.

When a game studio decides to make a sequel to a game they already have, they have a few choices: they can either make a sequel that only follows through on the story aspect of the original game, keeping the gameplay the same. This is what happens in Puzzle Agent 2; you’re Nelson Tethers, and you have some unfinished business in Scoggins. You’ve already solved this mystery before, but the story doesn’t end there… So you go back, do a few more puzzles, and get to the bottom of things.

When you’re playing through Puzzle Agent 2, you feel right at home if you’ve already played the games. Admittedly, the puzzle mechanics are more or less the same this time around: with a few notable exceptions, the puzzles don’t vary in type — if you’ve solved one, you’ve pretty much solved them all. It could be that I had already encountered these kinds of puzzles before (in the previous game), but the puzzles were decidedly… easy this time around.

Which brings me to my gripe about Puzzle Agent 2, as a sequel to the original game (which we also reviewed). When a game studio decides to make a sequel to a game they already have, they have a few choices: they can either make a sequel that only follows though on the story aspect of the original game, keeping the gameplay the same, or, they can continue the story and vary the gameplay mechanics, and that’s exactly what Puzzle Agent 2 isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, as far as sequels go Puzzle Agent 2 is, if nothing else, faithful to the original, but it would have been nice to see a few new types of puzzles (of course, then we run into the issue of detracting from the appeal of the original game, which is a whole other can of worms).

All in all, Puzzle Agent 2 was an enjoyable game. Not stellar, but the original was such brilliance it almost doesn’t matter. It’s perhaps a fraction shorter, and there are around 30 puzzles to be solved compared however many the original has (a quick dig suggests 50 or so).

$5.49 in the Australian App Store. There’s two separate versions, so make sure you’re buying the right version for your device: iPhone, iPad.

Ghost Trick

I think Ghost Trick might be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played.

I’ve said before that I’m no stranger to playing games purely for their great storyline, or even (gasp!) playing games on lower difficulty settings just to experience the storyline in all its glory, and Ghost Trick is no different.

Only there aren’t a number of “difficulty levels” in Ghost Trick. There’s not much of anything apart from the core game really, and the game isn’t any worse off for it — in fact, I’d almost say it’s better off. The game and concepts you’ll come across while playing the game are already complex enough without the added complexity of “difficulty levels” or added fluff that doesn’t add anything to the game or how it plays out.

I won’t say too much about the game itself lest I spoil the experience for you, but Ghost Trick is perhaps one of the most unique games I’ve played in a while. Gameplay consists of the main character, played by yourself, using what are described as “ghost tricks” (essentially “special abilities”, whatever they are) to solve all manner of puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles can vary, sometimes you won’t even know what you’re supposed to do with two suits of armour and a medicine bottle, and sometimes you’ll be forced to navigate your way through the dark, but the context of the game (if you’ve been paying any attention at all) will give you clues along the way. So too, will the characters — provided you read the dialog as it comes. And if you happen to fail any given puzzle, well, then you might get a hint at what you can try as well.

In the area of storyline and plot, Ghost Trick is unparalleled. I’ve yet to play a game that has such an incredible storyline; I’d even go so far as to say Ghost Trick is easily on par with some of the triple-A titles I’ve played. For an iOS game, however, Ghost Trick is nothing short of amazing in every possible way, and for a portable title by a respectable game development company, it more than holds its own.

That said, Ghost Trick is quite a linear game in that there’s only one way to solve the puzzles you encounter, only one correct sequence of events that will progress you to the next chapter. On more than one occasion I was quite stuck in not knowing how to proceed to the next chapter; not because I had no idea how to do so, but because I had no idea how to do so given the current context of the puzzle at hand. You’ll might be forced to play through any given scenario within a chapter, but once you start thinking out of the box you’ll be solving the puzzles with (relative) ease.

Getting stuck was not a point of frustration though (well maybe it was, at least temporarily when all I wanted to do was progress the storyline), because the challenge was all the more satisfying after having had a stern talking to and beating it thoroughly. What I’m saying is that Ghost Trick is somewhat linear, yes, but it kind of has to be in order to tell the story in a way that doesn’t confuse you even more.

In no way does “linear” equal “simplistic”, however, because some of the gameplay and concepts explained within Ghost Trick means Ghost Trick is more Inception than Inception, as one friend put it, and you might even struggle to solve the puzzles at times if you aren’t using 110% of your brain power. If you get engrossed in the story early on (and it’s hard not to be, seeing as that’s kinda what the entire game revolves around), I guarantee you will be completely and utterly engrossed in the storyline of Ghost Trick up until the very end.

Thus far into the review, I’ve said quite a bit about Ghost Trick without saying much at all, and all because it’s quite hard to describe why Ghost Trick is so good. Not being able to describe why it works so well as a game is one of the unique qualities about Ghost Trick, and it means that, for the first time ever, I have to say you’ll just have to experience it for yourself. Before you do so, a few notes: it’s not for those who have short attention spans, unless you’re playing it chapter by chapter. It’s also not for those who enjoy thinking outside of the box when it comes to solving puzzles.

If you’re a fan of epic story lines and some seriously convoluted puzzles, however, then I have an inkling you will find Ghost Trick a seriously amazing game, as I and many others have. Ghost Trick would be much more frustrating if there you could only fail sections a limited number of times, but thankfully there aren’t (you might understand this statement a little more after you’ve played the game).

As an aside, after completing Ghost Trick on the iPhone I felt compelled to play it on the original release platform, and I can say with some certainty that Capcom has done a great job of making it work well on the iPhone compared to the Nintendo DS. Ghost Trick on the DS doesn’t seem to utilise dual screens as effectively as it could have done, and I can say it looks and plays quite a bit better on the iPhone. The graphics are a little chunky on the iPad, but you do get a bigger screen to play with. Your choice.

Capcom has also done a good job with the iOS release of Ghost Trick, aside from simply upgrading the graphics and porting it across, as far as the App Store goes. The base game itself comes with the first three chapters, and is free on the App Store. This means that even if you download it and don’t end up even opening it, you’re not out of pocket, but if you do happen to like it, then you can purchase the rest of the chapters via In-App Purchase. If you are thinking of purchasing extra chapters, my advice to you is to buy all of them at once. It works out less than the other two options, and there’s no way you won’t want to play Ghost Trick to completion once you get a few chapters in. Perhaps one of my only gripes is that it doesn’t sync game progress via iCloud — developers, if you’re releasing a game that has high scores or progression and works on multiple devices, please, consider syncing high scores and/or progression with iCloud.

I played and completed Ghost Trick over the course of a week, playing a few chapters at a time, and it wasn’t until I sat down to write this review that I realised how subtle the storyline of Ghost Trick actually is. Without giving away too much, it’s the little nuances that all come together that make this one of my most highly recommended games I’ve yet reviewed; I know it’s probably too early to call an iOS game of the year, but Ghost Trick is definitely in the lead thus far.

Extremely highly recommended. I know the type of game isn’t for everyone, but if you’re looking for something that is a bit more in-depth than the pick-up and put-down games we see so much of on the App Store these days (i.e. the likes of Angry Birds, Tiny Wings, and similar other high-score chasers), then please, play this game.

Puzzlejuice

If you combined Tetris and some kind of crazy word-making game, what would you get?

You would get something that resembled Puzzlejuice, ladies and gentlemen, and that’s just about the best way to describe it; Puzzlejuice is a combination of the falling-blocks Tetris you know and love, and one of the best word-puzzlers I’ve yet played, all wrapped up in a fun little package with little coloured squares and a fun soundtrack.

Make no mistake, Puzzlejuice is fiendish if you play it on the hardcore Euro Extreme Mode. Actually, scratch that; it’s fiendish whichever mode you choose to play it on. It’s the type of game that has a hard mode that is easy (literally, the easiest mode is called “hard mode”), and it’s exactly the kind of game that you should be playing if you enjoy word puzzlers. Euro Extreme Mode just adds an added level of difficulty into the mix by forcing you to create words of five-or-more letters in order to clear surrounding blocks.

Puzzlejuice is challenging at the best of times because you’re simultaneously tasked with managing an ever-falling cascade of blocks into some orderly form, as well as having to manage the brain-stretching task of creating words from scrambled letters. Having to do those two tasks simultaneously is uniquely challenging, and it makes Puzzlejuice a hard game to excel at, and you know what?

It’s fantastic.

It’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea due to how difficult it can be though, and those with smaller vocabularies need not apply — but if you enjoy beating the pants off your friends in Words With Friends, want something a little more challenging, and enjoy eating pressure for breakfast on a daily basis, then Puzzlejuice will be right up your alley.

Don’t get me wrong, mastering Puzzlejuice is no mean feat. It’s a fast-paced game that requires you to think on your thumbs, meaning that you not only have to have a sharp mind, but also even faster thumbs. It’s a fantastic game, and available in the App Store for $1.99.

Game Dev Story

I think Game Dev Story might be one of the best games I’ve ever played on my iPhone, and here’s why: it’s brilliantly good fun.

I remember hearing about Game Dev Story early on, and seeing as it was a game about developing games that was well acclaimed, it was definitely something I was interested in. I downloaded it not too long after it was released, and put it in a special folder on my iPhone labelled “to review”.

Fast forward a few weeks and I still hadn’t touched it, much less given it a thorough play-through. At this point I wondered whether I would ever give it a play.

I remember my first play-through clearly: it was late, I had already spent an inordinate amount of time doing some other stuff on the computer, and I was ready for bed. As my head hit the pillow I decided to check Twitter one last time, and on a whim, opened Game Dev Story to see what all the fuss was about.

It wasn’t until 4, maybe 5am that I realised I should probably think about some sleep — but at that point, it was too late (early?) to do so, so I just continued playing. I was hooked.

So here’s the rub: in Game Dev Story, it’s your job to manage an office of developers, designers, writers, artists, musicians as they develop games. Some of the time you’ll be doing contract work to quickly gain capital so you can work on your own titles, some of the time you’ll be, uh, working on you own titles, and later on in the piece, sometimes you’ll even be developing your own console (then working on titles for that).

When they called it Game Dev Story, they weren’t kidding. You manage almost every aspect of game development, from the hiring and firing of staff, the offices your staff occupy, salaries, and, of course, your choice of jobs and the direction of your current title takes. During game development you’re also tasked with the job of marketing your game — advertising, getting the word out there, and so on.

But wait, there’s more! After your game ships, then you have to worry about how well it does on the market. It’s not just about sitting back and watching the cash roll in — you can do that, of course, but why spend that time idle when you could be developing Xbawks Shooter 2? Or Real Pony Extravaganza 3? Finally, there’s also a Game Dev Conference you can attend (if you so choose) — this is more of a marketing thing than anything else, but it’s still pretty fun to see if you can have more attendees than you did last year.

Much of your time in Game Dev Story is spent managing your team to develop games. The goal of the game is to be successful, and that in and of itself requires serious cash. Serious cash requires games that sell really well, and games that sell really well requires a brilliant team of developers, designers, writers, artists, and musicians. If you get nothing else right, pay attention to the people that you can hire! Games are rated based on Fun, Creativity, Graphics, and Sound — all the best games are well balanced throughout all these categories, and your game has a better chance of succeeding.

I’ve probably written way too much about a really fantastic game, but I’ll finish with a recommendation: I’d you’re at all interested in game development, or think you have what it takes to be, like a project manager or something, if you like making decisions, then get this game. You can become a successful game provided you make the right decisions along the way — just remember to have fun while you’re doing it.

Game Dev Story is $4.49 in the Australian App Store, and is easily one of the best games I’ve played.

ZONR

As far as games that capitalise on the touch mechanics of iOS go, ZONR is one of those engagingly simple games that you won’t be able to put down. (I didn’t say it! I didn’t say addictive! Oh, wait…)

Armed with naught but your digits, 90 seconds on the clock, you’re tasked with touching the largest zone. Doing so nets you points, doing so consistently nets you multipliers to elevate your score to even further heights; as you might expect, Game Center integration comes as standard for those bragging rights you’ve always wanted.

When I first started with ZONR it was as if I had already been here: not the actual game itself, but the whole genre of limited-replayability games on the App Store, games which only take a minute or two to play while you’re standing in line, on the bus, or want to distract yourself from work for a second.

But you know what? ZONR does a pretty bang-up job of the above genre, even if it means it might not be a title you’ll keep coming back to again and again.

Sometimes it’s not just about how much you’ll play a game in the future, but how much you’ll enjoy it when you are playing it. And on that level, ZONR delivers in spades with its uniquely challenging game mechanic and fantastic use of the touch paradigm.

ZONR is free in the App Store.

Twitterlator Neue

As far as Twitter clients on iOS go, Twitterlator Neue is stunningly beautiful. There’s not a pixel out of place, and it’s an incredibly slick app — many common actions are very easy, and it has about as many features as you would want (with perhaps a few curious omissions — more on these later). In an App Store filled with more Twitter apps than you can fit in a single tweet¹, Twitterlator Neue is right up there with the best of them.

Before there was Twitterlator, there was Tweetbot, and Tweetbot is currently the go-to app on the iPhone for many Twitter enthusiasts. Twitterlator doesn’t seem to match Tweetbot feature for feature, but perhaps does things a little differently; some say Tweetbot is a little too over-engineered, a little too over-designed, and Twitterlator is none of that — just a good, clean interface to help you get your tweeting done.

First, there’s the timeline. I’ll get to the crazy jumping navigation bar in a bit, but the main timeline is very well designed. Wait, scratch that — the whole app is nothing short of very nicely designed. The first thing you have to know about Twitterlator Neue is that it’s set in beautiful Helvetica Neue Light, and it looks amazing. Stunning, even. Everything is nicely textured with an almost paper-like look and feel, and it looks fantastic.

In terms of actually doing stuff, you can tap and hold on a tweet to bring up an action bar, to let you reply, retweet, favourite, save a link for later (yay, Instapaper!), or do something else (copy email, translate, or even post to Facebook). The action bar is a great way to do commonly-done things really simply, and it’s excellent to see the app developers have thought that kind of stuff through.

Instapaper support in Twitterlator is great, too. If there aren’t any links in the tweet, hitting the link button sends a link to that tweet to Instapaper — something I want to do more often than you would think (email works but takes too long, and favouring the tweet doesn’t seem right). Most other times, hitting the link button means you will Instapaper however many links there are in the tweet, with a link to the original tweet as the description text when viewed on the Instapaper website (as opposed to what Tweetbot does, i.e. saving the originating tweet text as the description). It makes saving five links from a single tweet just as easy as saving one, and that’s just one of the ways Twitterlator makes your Twitter experience that much better, especially if you tend to Instapaper interesting-looking links as often as I do.

I’ve often been curious about inline photos in any Twitter app, and no Twitter client I’ve seen to date does inline photos as well as Twitterlator. Other clients show tiny image thumbnails in the timeline, making the feature essentially useless and taking up valuable vertical screen area to boot. Twitterlator does it a little differently — instead of showing you to whole photo, it only shows you a small sliver. You can expand the photo by simply tapping on it, which has a cool expanding animation. Plus, there’s no lag at all when you decide to look at the full photo — Twitterlator must do some fancy pre-caching here, as the photo expansion animation is instantaneous after you tap on it or swipe up. It’s fantastic: tap on the photo to expand it, then swipe down to close the photo when you’re done. Boom. Of course, if you dislike inline photos you’ll be glad to know you can turn that option off, but with an implementation this good, doing so would be definitely be a shame.

Navigation between different areas of the app (in order from left to right: profile, messages, timeline, mentions, other), is accomplished through a Windows Phone 7-like horizontal swipe, or by tapping on icons in the bottom bar. Before version 1.0.2 the bottom bar would automatically pop up and down like the craziest jackrabbit you’ve ever seen — which was cool as it allowed more space for tweets to be displayed — but in the current version, 1.0.2, they seem to have made it more of a permanent thing and it now doesn’t pop up and down with nearly as much frequency as it used to. To be honest, I don’t mind either way.

There’s also an inbuilt browser that automatically starts loading pages as soon as you go to the single tweet view. You can then swipe up on the page and that will expand it up so you can use it, and then hit done when you’re finished.

As much praise as I have for Twitterlator Neue, I think there are a few curious feature omissions when the app was launched.

I know push notifications is a bit of a hassle for Twitter app developers, but it’s almost a standard feature these days. I hope that push notifications using the streaming API will come to Twitterlator in the near future. For now, you’re stuck with Boxcar.

I also can’t attach multiple photos to a single tweet. I know this is par for the course (apparently the official Twitter app can’t do this either, I think a limitation of the official Twitter picture service), but for an app that supports multiple image services, I should at least be given the option. Tweetbot is smart enough to know the difference between which image service and restrict you appropriately (that is, you can attach multiple images if you’re using something other than the official Twitter picture service), Twitterlator should be able to as well.

My final gripe with Twitterlator is more of a personal preference than anything else, and that’s gap detection and support. The problem with Twitterlator is that it doesn’t seem to load a lot of tweets at a time, and that means gaps frequently appear in my timeline. This likely isn’t an issue if you’re following only a (few?) hundred people or less, but it is for me. Just loading a small number of tweets probably wouldn’t be a problem normally, but it is because how the app deals with gaps isn’t great. It bottom loads them, meaning that if you’re trying to catch up on tweets (reading from the bottom towards the top) that’s bad. Fine if you’re reading from the top towards the bottom, but bad otherwise. Tweetbot does both styles of loading depending on where the gap is on the screen, and that’s easily the best implementation of gap detection and support I’ve seen yet. Brilliant is an understatement.

If I was picking nits I would say I don’t like how Twittelator doesn’t differentiate my tweets in the stream (my avatar is on the right along with everyone else’s), nor how it doesn’t highlight mentions in my timeline. Once again, those are more personal preference things rather than anything else; your mileage may vary.

For all my gripes (most of which are, realistically, fairly petty personal-preference type gripes), there’s a lot to love about Twitterlator. There’s great multiple account support, (including tweeting from multiple accounts simultaneously), there’s a great mechanism for searching (you can search for tweets, people, or even location with a single tap, plus it even remembers recent searches), it has support for draft tweets, and there’s even good support for lists (viewing, editing, adding shortcuts, and so on). I didn’t use them a lot, but if you want quick shortcuts to any of your lists or just about any timeline you come across, you can have that as well.

I hinted at this a little earlier in the piece, but the thing I love about iOS is that apps can seemingly come out of nowhere and steal the crown from the previous king. Before Twitterlator there were really only two choices for Twitter: the official Twitter app, or the utterly fantastic Tweetbot. The 2.x days of Tweetie are long gone, and while there are many other great alternatives out there (off the top of my head: Weet, Echofon, Icebird, Twitterrific), Twitter and Tweetbot sat squarely at the top of the pile. Now, Twitterlator joins them — not bad for a Twitter client that was built from scratch in 120 days.

Twitterlator is available in your local App Store for the introductory price of $1.99 — an absolute pittance for one of the best iPhone Twitter clients yet.

World of Goo

It’s been a while since the last post. Most notably, iOS app prices have become more aligned with prices in the US up to a point, which means more relevant app prices! Yay!

Oh look, our very first iPad review! Sadly, this is just a once-off — I still don’t have an iPad, so you’ll have to wait a little longer for regular¹ iPad-specific reviews.

I’ve now played the first chapter (The Goo-filled Hills) of World of Goo on every single one of the platforms that it’s available on; Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Wii. We can start off by classing these different platforms into three different categories:

• Mac, Windows, and Linux all fall into the desktop category. This is the traditional, window-based UI you know and love, and are controlled via a keyboard and a mouse.

• IPhone and iPad fall into the touch category. Instead of using a keyboard and mouse, you’re using the touch interaction model to do things with apps. Tap, instead of click.

• The Wii, on the other hand, falls squarely into the other category. This one is a little harder to pin down, but essentially it’s just anything which isn’t a keyboard or a mouse or touch-based interaction.

As a game, World of Goo works much the same pretty much everywhere, and it’s only the control method that actually changes. Whether you’re clicking and dragging the little balls of goo with your mouse, tapping and holding to move the little balls of goo, or even waving a special wand to control an on-screen pointer to manoeuvre the little balls of goo around, things work pretty much the same.

At this point I’ll hand over to Tom Bissell, who talks about games on the iPad beyond just Angry Birds (who also reviews a few other popular iPad games):

I wish I lived in a world in which 2D Boy’s World of Goo was as popular as Angry Birds, because World of Goo is by any metric a more beautiful, involving, and enchanting puzzler — one of the best video games period, in fact, this critic has ever played. Developed with the life savings of two young designers who once punched a clock at Electronic Arts, World of Goo is the rare video game that virtually anyone can enjoy: parents, kids, Call of Duty twitchers, significant others, sentient androids, superintelligent chimps. It is hard to describe the game without using vaguely pornographic language (“In this level, you have to build a goo tower”), but that is part of its charm. Here is a game in which vaguely sexual signifiers collide with vaguely geopolitical imagery: The game world’s “goo,” with which you build teeter-tottery structures, resembles nothing so much as petroleum. It is like seeing a gorgeous piece of sneakily subversive pop art squirm, flex, flow, and topple at your command.

He continues on with probably the best part of the whole thing:

The best part of World of Goo is how perfectly suited it is to the iPad’s touchscreen interface, even though its gameplay was originally conceived with a mouse in mind. I have now built goo contraptions with both a mouse and my finger, and the difference between the two is about as severe as that between masturbation and full-on intercourse. The mouse is a serviceable device, certainly, and gets the job done, but using the direct application of a body part to make computer magic removes one crucial layer from the already cyborgian experience of playing video games. World of Goo has been around for almost three years now, so take it from a fresh convert: If you care about games at all and have not yet played it, buy, steal, or borrow an iPad immediately and get on it. World of Goo is that good.

World of Goo on the iPad is just that good, so good that Bissell goes as far as to recommend you go out and acquire an iPad at whatever cost so as to play World of Goo, an indie game from guys who used to work at EA.

I’ve read a lot of reviews for iPad apps, and never really got the statement “feels like it was made for the iPad” until after I had played World of Goo. It’s not just great — it’s fantastic.

If you own an iPhone and an iPad, buy the HD version (which works on both devices). Even if you only own an iPhone like I do, get the HD version just to support the developers (and just in case you do acquire an iPad by some means in the future). $5.49 in an App Store near you.

Kapowie

Kapowie by Bjango is a game of both time pressure and accuracy.

Over a number of levels, you’re given a number of bullets to shoot various things with. The instructions at the start of each level in the round usually give you some target; “shoot ten targets within the next ten seconds using no more than 40 bullets”.

You’re presented with your accuracy and total score after every round, and the rounds keep repeating (with increasing difficulty).

What I like about Kapowie is that it takes some skill to hit things, especially in later rounds. It’s surprisingly difficult to hit the canyon cannonballs, for example.

Sometimes the simplest games are the easiest to review, and Kapowie is no exception. Free in the App Store.

MetaSquares

Without making too many crass generalisations, MetaSquares is a game for intellectuals, and those particularly good at 2D geometric manipulations and pattern recognition will excel at this game — which, quite handily, explains why I am actually quite bad at it.

The aim of MetaSquares is that you place circular-shaped objects (we’ll call them pebbles) on a grid-like board, where the objective is to make your pebbles form a square shape (where the edges of the pebbles are the four corners of the square). The squares can be any size, although you’re restricted to the size of the board — the largest sized square you can make with a “regular” square shape is worth 64 points. To win a round of MetaSquares, you’ve got to reach 150 points and be ahead by at least 15 points.

Normally you would just go about your merry business, making squares until you reach the 150 points, but you’re playing against a computer here, a computer which can (unfortunately) block your moves, preventing you from reaching your target. The part were brains are required is the fact that you can create squares at different angles. The more angled the square, the more points you receive, which essentially means that you can create angled squares in very little space. Handy if you’ve already filled up the rest of the board.

Unfortunately, the one flaw about MetaSquares is that it seemingly isn’t available in the App Store any longer. It is, however, available as a web app. Happy square-making, intellectuals.