Author: Richard Moss

Kind of Soccer is true to its name. You fling a ball from one player to another, hoping to line up a shot—not at the goal, however, but the referee, who runs about like a headless chicken desperate to avoid becoming dinner. Goals don’t matter at all, in fact, nor do offside rulings, corner kicks, or any of the complexities of the beautiful game that bewilder non-believers. This is the kind of silliness that anyone can get behind.

You’ll drag your finger in the opposite direction of where you want the ball to go, with an arrow appearing to give an approximation of its direction. Your players don’t move, so you lose possession if a pass is off base. Opponents do move, however—at least above the bottom few difficulty levels. They amble around the field, always making a beeline toward the ball. Lose possession and you lose a point. Hit the referee and you gain one. First to five wins.

It’s incredibly simple, but also super tough. Your room for error starts small and gets smaller with each advancement through the 10 difficulty levels on offer. Time and space to line up a pass or shot both slip away quickly when players from the other team are bearing down on the man in possession. A series of zany power-ups help here, as well as add to the light-hearted fun—with highlights including one that temporarily turns all opposing players into trees, and another that puts a second referee onto the pitch.

Time Mode provides a semblance of longevity. It lets you set a countdown timer at any of a few intervals between 30 seconds and five minutes, and places you on a random pitch in a battle to outscore your opponent and to maximize a separate points tally. But Kind of Soccer’s quirky referee-pelting antics only hold appeal for so long, and there’s not much depth to the strategy once you master the initially tricky core mechanic.

The bottom line. Kind of Soccer’s quirky and ridiculous hit-the-referee hook is backed by fun-yet-challenging gameplay and a cool lo-fi aesthetic, though its ultimately shallow nature shows through sooner or later.

Family Guy made its name on TV by being simultaneously derivative and edgy; it riffed on The Simpsons’ formula of an animated nuclear family with a drunken, lovingly-dumb father, but its gags went further or weirder. And it did it well. So you might have reason for thinking that Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff—which takes its cues from The Simpsons: Tapped Out—might also push boundaries and poke fun at conventions. You’d be sadly mistaken. The Quest for Stuff is a shallow, money-grubbing, cynical, and downright boring freemium city builder with few redeeming qualities.

On the positive side, great care has clearly gone into the graphics, with all the little visual details replicated on even minor characters and buildings. It’s chock full of the same sharp dialog you know and love (or hate) from the show—albeit mostly without voice acting. Many jokes are recycled from the series, but there are plenty of original (and funny) ones that self-consciously reference the senselessness of your experience and the minutiae of previous episodes. The game hits its high point before you even start playing, though, delivering a delightful animated opening in which Family Guy gets canceled again and Peter fights the Giant Chicken (revealed to be the president of Fox) in a battle that destroys the entire town.

Your job is to rebuild Quahog, a feat made challenging not through difficulty but rather suffocating timers that drag progress to a standstill. You don’t play The Quest for Stuff so much as periodically jump in and tap stuff for 30 seconds to bank money and experience, and put Peter’s friends and family to work on new quests/activities. That’s all done so that you may eventually rebuild a new section of the town or unlock new characters, costumes, and quests—ready to repeat ad infinitum.

What’s worse are the minuscule amounts of money and experience most buildings produce on a rolling basis—some as often as every minute, others over a few hours. These resources halt production entirely until you tap to reset them. It’s a slog to get anywhere without splashing the cash, whether you’ve played for five minutes or several hours, and it’s simply not worth the trouble to wade through the crap for well-written speech bubbles and quest descriptions.

The bottom line. No amount of fan service or witty writing can save Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff from mediocrity born of leaden pacing and shameless freemium money-grubbing.

David doesn’t pull any punches. Its blissful, serenely sparse world is populated by multitudes of terrifying two-dimensional shapes, all hell-bent on snuffing the life out of your little box-shaped hero. All you have in your defense are wits and agility, along with a special projectile ability that takes a few seconds to charge. David’s physics-driven rumination on the struggles of life feels almost poignant at times, and its abstract design works mostly in its favor—but the game is also extremely difficult and not for the easily frustrated.

Each of the eight main levels—and another that you can unlock later—is designed to fit its theme. In Anger, a writhing mass of floating white diamonds pursues your hero, periodically firing gleaming darts that hone in on your position. Anxiety puts you in a maze suspended above an altar that shoots dozens of glowing squares upwards. Flee, meanwhile, starts you off defenseless and surrounded by danger, as a mass of ovals gives chase through a winding path.

The dominant emotion through everything, though, tends toward frustration. Each level can be played on one of two difficulties: “Okay” gives you seven hit points, while “Very” leaves you with just one. It’s enough of a challenge just to survive in either mode, but on top of not dying, you’ll need to exterminate your foes by shooting out charged particles—which have only a short range and loop back around to you like a boomerang in a beautiful display of color. Charging a shot involves tapping and holding on the center-point of your avatar (and optionally dragging toward a target), and everything slows down while this happens, granting precious time to plot an escape route away from danger.

Both the tilt and touch screen controls work well for changing direction, though the need to constantly tap the jump button to move higher—something you’ll have to do while charging shots, as well as in normal play—makes the game feel in moments like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. It gets easier with practice in the Arena mode, which also features a points-based progression system separate from the main game, but David never stops being excruciatingly hard. Thankfully, that difficulty manages to work in its favor, acting as a touching metaphor for the trials of life and the herculean effort it can take to triumph over adversity.

The bottom line. David presents an abstract, dangerous world that’s as tough as it is beautiful and surprisingly emotive.

Supercell’s Boom Beach sticks close to the basic formula established by mega-hit predecessors Clash of Clans and Hay Day, but it brings an enticing new combat system that grants you greater control over your own fate. It’s war of oceanic proportions, as you work to liberate the natives of one island after another from the evil Blackguard (as well as from rival players).

Your goals boil down to two needs: keeping your headquarters protected from invaders—with help from an assortment of mines, defensive buildings, and strategic placement—and building up an army strong enough to take down the headquarters of any island not under your control.

These core goals are backed by secondary ones; you need gold and wood (and later, also iron and stone) to build stuff and pay for new units, or to explore more of the map. Resources come at a trickle of x per hour from a variety of sources, but must be manually banked with a multitude of taps on the screen, leading to the kind of busywork that’s become standard in casual games post-Farmville.

Boom Beach’s battles are where the magic happens. You get control over where and when each landing vessel drops off its personnel—which will be some multiple of one of the half-dozen unit types—and you have a gunship to help direct your troops around, heal them, and shoot missiles at enemy buildings. Such interactions make for tense viewing, and these concessions keep you engaged and invested in the action from landing to retreat/victory/defeat.

But there’s not a lot of playing in Boom Beach, really. You’ll spend a few minutes banking resources and upgrading and building new units or buildings (only one at a time, sadly), fight a few skirmishes to reclaim lost villages or beat down newly-discovered foes, and then return to whatever it is you were doing outside the game. You can subvert the system with diamonds, so that everything happens instantly, though that’ll cost you a fortune in real money—especially as the prices increase exponentially with each level. It’s ultimately a stellar example of habitual, piecemeal gaming, for better or worse.

The bottom line. Boom Beach continues Supercell’s fight for your wallet in a solid, yet unspectacular freemium combat strategy game that rewards the patient and meticulous.

Arithmetic has never been so strangely fun as in Calculords, a collectible card game from developer Ninja Crime and comedy writer Seanbaby that puts math calculations at its very core. It has a bit of a learning curve, and its NES-inspired retro art style may prove divisive, but there’s a lot to like once you get over that initial hump. Computer-controlled opponents give as good as — or even better than — they get, complete with snappy taunts and humorous sci-fi-referencing one-liners, and you can easily find yourself locked in battles for hours without noticing how much time has passed.

Cards can only be played through pairing with a number tile of the same value, but it’s rare that you’ll have these pairs ready and waiting for you at the start of a round. The catch is that you need to add, subtract, and multiply numbers to make the values that match the cards you’d like to play. There’s loads of strategic value in playing certain cards before or after others, based on combinations of health points, attack points, and special abilities, and this naturally filters through to how you might reach your ideal sums. Using a seven just because you have a card with a value of seven isn’t necessarily the wisest move; indeed, it may be better if you multiply it with nine and then subtract one to get a far more useful vehicle into play.

The actual play field consists of three lanes, with you and your opponent at opposite ends. If a unit reaches the end of the lane, it attacks the corresponding base. If your base runs out of health, you lose. There’s a huge variety of viable strategies that make use of a mix of tactical, offensive, and push cards, and it soon becomes apparent that certain maneuvers work better with one foe than the others. In-app purchases of card packs or the Calculords Fun Club — the latter of which removes ads and improves your victory loot for $1.99 — make progress easier, but they’re by no means essential. With or without them, Calculords requires a long road to mastery.

The bottom line. Calculords inventively combines math with collectible card gaming and old-school aesthetics to offer a deeply enjoyable experience that’s more than the sum of its parts.

To carry the breakfast analogy through to its full extent, Force of Habit’s retro-styled tower defense/shoot-‘em-up hybrid Toast Time comes with a glass of insanity and a side of ridiculousness. It’s utterly bonkers and lightning-fast right from the start, with a typically British kind of over-the-top silliness and tongue-in-cheek humor, though there’s a solid mechanic at the core.

Your singular preserve from a ruined breakfast is Terry the toaster’s projectile bread slices, which you fire at inter-dimensional, time-rushing beasts intent on sneaking off with your morning meal time (seriously). The one and only control mechanic involves tapping on the screen where you’d like to shoot, which sends Terry veering off in the opposite direction. It’s an inherently imprecise form of locomotion that unfortunately leads to immense frustration as levels get more hectic. Terry has to contend with more than just the critters charging at the clock from all sides; he also gets blown about by fans, pushed into the air by pads, and caught on the wrong side of a barrier all too easily.

Manipulating the controls to get where you need is challenging enough, but Toast Time piles on the difficulty — especially in the second half of its 45 levels. The game tries to balance this out with more powerful forms of toast, such as rapid-fire breadcrumbs or multi-slice baguettes, which you unlock as you progress, but these do little to compensate for the real issue here. Getting Terry where you want him — and aiming toast shots in general — simply gets too finicky for the degree of precision the level designs demand, and he scoots off at such speed that it’s not always clear what’ll happen to him after you fire a shot.

That said, Toast Time is delightful in the early stages and whenever else you manage to bend it to your will. It looks and sounds a peach, with adorable (and customizable) outfits to boot, and there’s enough variety to keep it fresh throughout. Just be prepared for some major frustration on the back end.

The bottom line. Toast Time perfectly captures the chaos of a rushed breakfast; similarly, it doesn’t always sit well and it’s tough to fully digest.

Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride creator Halfbrick takes on publishing duties for Band Stars, a charming but shallow game by Six Foot Kid that lets you climb the charts and conquer the music world. It takes after Kairosoft’s (Game Dev Story, Dungeon V…

Zynga’s Skateboard Slam pulls out some solid tricks and coasts over the finish line without ever breaking a sweat, although its upgrade and level unlocking systems seem cynically balanced to drive additional in-app purchases. In a fun, surprisingly d…

PikPok’s latest Flick Kick game offers the most complete and varied experience in the series so far, with the whole gamut of basic on-field soccer situations backed by team building, a curious tale of revenge, and a multi-division league structure. B…

Morphopolis may be one of the most beautiful games we’ve seen this year, but its remarkable looks aren’t always backed up by strong puzzle design. Taking on the role of a caterpillar as it undergoes five metamorphoses into ever larger insects, you

Pathogen stylishly refashions the classic game of Go into a deadly struggle between warring cells and viruses. You’ll face off against one or more opponents in either a single-player campaign or on multiplayer maps, with the end goal being to control…

Me vs. You captures much of the competitiveness and fun of air hockey in an abstract, single-screen two-player game, though you should be wary of who you play it with. It’s actually three games in one, each with a distinct set of rules and interactio…

Hunting never felt so base and inhumane as in Deer Hunter 2014, the latest in a long line of titles that has evolved progressively far from its moniker and expanded now to include endangered animals. The core shooting and weapon upgrading experience is…

Adventure games aren’t dead (and they never really were), but we’re long past their best days, when companies like LucasArts and Sierra bashed out a new comedic masterpiece every year, and more cerebral titles like Myst and Riven dominated sales ch…

Like a cross between the critically acclaimed PlayStation 2 hit Shadow of the Colossus and Forbidden Forest for the Commodore 64, A Ride Into the Mountains asks you to hop on your pixelated horse and shoot odd floating monsters with arrows until a dist…

League of Geeks’ debut game Armello was one of the stars of the show floor at the PAX Australia pop-culture convention last weekend. Coming next year to iOS, it’s a gorgeous turn-based strategy offering that draws elements from card and board games, as…