Author: David Price

Nerds of a certain age are sure to have fond memories of Space Hulk), one of the great board games of the late 1980s. Set in the same grim, futuristic universe as Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargame, Space Hulk for iPad is an altogether tighter experience that Warhammer’s grand, sprawling battles—Space Hulk is condensed into a claustrophobic system of ducts and corridors. It’s a game of rare simplicity, elegance, and tension.

Space Hulk was originally for two players, although in the iPad version you can play against the computer. (There’s also local and online multiplayer, although the latter can involve a certain amount of tedious waiting around.) One player controls the humans: a handful of space marines in massive suits of armor, clanking around the derelict space ship of the game’s title and trying to accomplish their quest objectives. The other player gets an unlimited number of vicious, six-limbed aliens called Genestealers because of their parasitical lifecycle (as you may come to observe, Space Hulk owes something of a cultural debt to the Alien films). The Genestealers do their best to overwhelm the humans and claw them to pieces.

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Who could possibly have seen this coming? Hitman, the series of violent and visually sumptuous stealth shooting games, has come to iPad in the form of Hitman Go, a mannered, turn-based puzzle board game.

As bizarre as the juxtaposition seems, however, this isn’t quite as illogical as it sounds. For one thing, Hitman—despite the kinetic and controversy-baiting adverts and the heavily armed stripper nuns—was always a quieter game than it was given credit for; its big points are generally earned by slipping through a level with barely a ripple, taking down your mark cleanly while leaving the guards not only alive but unalerted.

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One key factor when evaluating PC and console games ported to iPad or iPhone is how well the controls have been adapted from keyboard, mouse and/or joypad to a touchscreen. But in this case that doesn’t really apply, because the controls in Surgeon Simulator are deliberately terrible.

Surgeon Simulator became a cult hit after being devised in a couple of days for Global Game Jam, and then being quickly polished up for commercial release. The whole thing is a single joke, essentially, but a rather good one: a life-or-death medical sim built around slapstick, ragdoll physics and cartoon graphics.

You’re Nigel, a catastrophically clumsy surgeon, bumbling and fumbling your way through complex operations on a (frequently blood-spurting and bone-fragment-strewn) patient/victim named Bob. This clumsiness is imposed by the game’s controls, which are so inaccurate that you spend half the game knocking medical instruments on the floor and losing things in the chest cavity. There is a vast and seemingly universal humor to this.

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Editor’s note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld U.K. Visit Macworld U.K. for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

Oh, what a missed opportunity this is. The subtle delights of Pointless, the U.K.’s finest teatime quiz show, are squandered in this pale and joyless adaptation for iOS, which has none of the charm of its inspiration and a heap of technical problems.

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Eliss Infinity is a follow-up to (or rather, an enhanced version of) the original Eliss. It’s elegant in its own way, although self-consciously retro in appearance: all raw pixels, plain lines and flat colors, like a pastel-tinged Asteroids.

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Got enough stress in your life? Looking for a nice game to help you relax? Lyne is a puzzle game catering to stressed-out iOS gaming fans.

Lyne is a universal app for both iPhone and iPad, although its bite-sized, one-thumb gameplay makes most sense on the smaller screen. It is naturally suited to the portrait handgrip of the commuter gamer, but unusually, it can be also played in landscape. The only difference is that the triangles rotate to suit the new setting.

Each level presents a grid of triangles, diamonds, and squares of (initially) various pastel colors, along with a few octagonal junction boxes. By tracing your finger across the screen you must draw a line connecting all of the yellow triangles, starting and ending with the heavier-bordered end blocks. Then you draw another connecting all the red squares, and so on. You can use each connecting line only once and touch each shape only once, and you also have to pass through each junction a set number of times—the number indicated by dots.
It sounds absurdly complicated, but it isn’t at all; indeed, you’ll grasp wthe gameply within a couple of tutorial levels. It all feels wholly natural—you wonder why no one has made the game before.

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Editor’s note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld U.K. Visit Macworld U.K. for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

You’ve played Cut The Rope, right? No? Have you been living on the planet Glong? For the six people and a cat who’ve not played it, Cut The Rope is one of the most successful iPhone games ever—a cheery, simple but perfectly crafted physics puzzle game where you have to feed a series of sweets to a cute monster called Om Nom.

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Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from Macworld U.K. Visit Macworld U.K.’s blog page for the latest Mac news from across the Atlantic.

Like most tower defense games, Fieldrunners 2 is based on a pretty hideous premise when you think about it. You throw up a few machine gun emplacements, maybe a couple of static missile launchers or some pipes to spray the enemy with crude oil while they get roasted alive by flamethrowers, then the cannon fodder turn up. Hundreds and hundreds of them: cutely designed goons sprinting gamely forward, clambering over the butchered carcasses of their buddies. They’re not even armed. What are you, some kind of monster?

One of the ways Fieldrunners 2 prevents you from dwelling on silly thoughts like this is to keep your mind constantly occupied. There are always problems to address, threats to deal with, towers that you need to get round to upgrading, or weak spots in your defenses that need filling. It’s a brilliantly frenetic game.

If you’re new to the tower defense concept, it’s a straightforward one. The enemy assaults you with waves of mobile troops; your job is to prevent these from getting to the other side of the screen by spending your money (that you earn by killing) on gun towers in strategic combinations that will funnel the bad guys into bottlenecks and then shoot them to pieces. (There I go, sounding all murderous again.)

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