Category: Reviews-HowTos

Despite its flashy neon lights and comic book-style interstitials, Flashout 2 is a pretty straightforward sci-fi-tinged racer: you’ll zoom around a futuristic track, earn cash, upgrade your podracer, and repeat. Here’s the catch: each hovercraft comes armed with a machine gun, rockets, and mines, and a quick trigger finger is often the difference between first and last.

As is often the case with touch-based racing games, controls are a sticking point for Flashout 2. Thankfully, developer Jujubee offers several different options, each of which has a sensitivity slider, but turns still prove frustrating—when tilting, you’ll have to make an elaborate gesture to make it around a tight curve, while you’ll have to extend your thumb halfway across the screen with the virtual pad to do the same. The virtual button configurations suffer for placing the brakes too close to the weapons and controls, but they’re still the most precise option of the bunch.

Once you get the hang of things, though, Flashout 2 becomes a competent, if insubstantial anti-gravity racer. The dozen-odd tracks are sufficiently curvy and dotted with power-ups, ammunition, boosts, money icons, and alternate routes. Unfortunately, all of the locales look and play alike, and while the hovercraft are certainly fast, they feel weightless and airy; you don’t hug corners as much as you careen though long straightaways. This actually makes for decent combat—you’ll weave in and out, trying to avoid enemy targeting while vying for position—but racing purists will find Flashout 2 flighty.

Despite the presence of in-app purchases, Flashout 2 handles its money deftly. Before each race, you can purchase a complement of shields, speed boosts, and weapons. Buy too little and your better-equipped opponents will fill you with bullets; buy too much and your hard-earned cash goes to waste since you can’t keep weapons from race to race. By setting the economy up like this, Flashout 2 encourages thriftiness and utilizing each track’s generous ammo and money caches to stay stocked. From there, you can save for big-ticket improvements or buy a new hovercraft outright.

The bottom line. Flashout 2 is fast and slick, but its combat and upgrade systems stand out more than its racing elements. There are more substantial sci-fi racers on the App Store, but Flashout 2 is a fun, lightweight diversion.

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.

Like the complicated father-son relationship between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, the marriage between the Star Wars franchise and card battling games has been a tumultuous one at best. Last year’s Star Wars Force Collection was a hands-off snooze affair bogged down by heavy micromanagement. The latest attempt at shoehorning a galaxy far, far away into a collectible card game format, however, is a vast improvement over what we’ve seen before. Star Wars: Assault Team packs all the polish, accessibility, and strategy that were sorely missing in Force Collection, even if it’s not an entirely fresh spin on collectible card combat.

Assault Team’s campaign weaves an interesting journey through the Star Wars universe. From the innermost depths of an Imperial Star Destroyer to the Wookiee home world and beyond, the settings and story elements are varied and thoughtfully presented. Missions send your party of rebels through elaborate animated 3D locations, with frequent pit stops to battle an expanding medley of foes.

Rather than just an exercise in repetitive tapping, the turn-based combat is strategically engaging. The longer, gauntlet-style levels require careful thought about which foes to attack in which order, along with which special hero powers to use and who to bring into battle. The parade of stormtroopers, Imperial droids, and beastly aliens keeps you switching things up too, since they each bring special powers and strengths to the battles. It’s a well-designed combat system that’s intuitive, and since you won’t struggle to figure out how everything works, you can focus more on tactical considerations.

Your four-person group is fleshed out early on with a few familiar faces, like Han Solo and his hairy cohort Chewbacca, and it quickly grows and changes as you amass hero cards to slot in. The character card artwork is authentic and beautifully designed, contrasting against some of the more plainly detailed backgrounds you’ll battle across. The strengths and abilities of each unique character also lend a lot of flexibility in battle.

Earning items in battle and spending in-game credits let you train your crew through an RPG-style progression system, which is as satisfying as it is necessary. Past the first tier of missions, your foes grow much stronger, and as such it gets a lot harder to progress without backtracking to grind a bit or spending premium currency to revive your fallen party mid-stage. This isn’t a big issue, since credits, gems, cards, and items are added to your pile the more you play. Spending cash is only necessary if you die a lot or are extremely impatient, however buying hero crates does kick up your power steadily. The more you spend, the more higher-powered gear and heroes you’ll have access to before they’d naturally appear through the normal course of play.

The bottom line. Star Wars: Assault Team is an engaging, strategy-minded card battler quest that’s a blast for series fans. However, its steep challenge might push you to spend more than you originally intended to once you get sucked in.

Marvel Comics’ latest film adaptation, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, has been receiving rave reviews in the run up to its release this Friday. Gameloft’s universal iOS beat-‘em-up of the same name has a fair bit going for it, as well, with solid presentation and quite a bit of content, but ultimately doesn’t captivate over the long haul. Spreading a small number of game mechanics and levels as thin as possible muddles what could have been a pretty strong action affair.

While the first Captain American movie game took the odd (but enjoyable) approach of a Mirror’s Edge-like side-scrolling runner, The Winter Soldier matches its super-powered subject well by letting you pummel ample goons and whip your star-emblazoned shield with ease. Using virtual buttons, taps and swipes, or a combination of the two control styles, you’ll wander through vertically-scrolling streets and metallic corridors, executing easy combos by hammering the single melee attack button, swiping to launch Cap’s shield, and occasionally using the suit-specific special ability—like a leaping ground-pound maneuver or a shield-driven rushing assault.

Simplistic as the combat may be, the brawling action is engaging at first, and you can recruit a pair of computer-controlled allies to support you with firearms—or occasionally call in Black Widow or Falcon to clear the screen of foes. The comic-esque aesthetic is generally solid, though the rare camera freak-out can be rather disorienting. The Winter Soldier’s main issue, however, comes with repetition. While expected from a button-mashing brawler, it’s amplified here by using the same handful of backdrops and enemy types over and over again for large chunks of its campaign, which totals nearly 100 brief missions at launch. Halving that total and offering more variety would’ve made for a really fun little brawler, but retreading the same ground ad nauseam proves tiring.

The Winter Soldier augments its main storyline action with various side elements, but none feel fleshed out or essential. You can battle random online opponents in the A.R.E.N.A. mode, but it amounts to nothing more than picking your squad members and flicking through a couple of menus; the “action” is totally automated and never shown. Meanwhile, the ability to combine and equip gems to enhance characters is unclear in spots, and spending coins to upgrade your buildings to house more allies than you’d ever actually need seems totally tacked on. Needing to be connected online at all times to play even the single-player story missions is also a frustratingly unnecessary aspect.

The bottom line. Solidly enjoyable (albeit super streamlined) brawling action makes The Winter Solidier an intriguing comic affair, but serious repetition and underwhelming side elements wear out its welcome.

Google is coming up with all kinds of clever ways to enhance its $35 Chromecast, which plugs into any HDMI-equipped television and allows compatible apps to “cast” video, music, and now photos to the big screen. Billed as a “Chrome Experiment,” Photowall for Chromecast is Google’s latest iOS app, which allows mobile devices to throw pictures onto an HDTV and make them come alive as a unique interactive composite.

Oddly, Photowall isn’t really an app, but rather a shortcut designed to help you connect to a Chromecast and then confirm your identity by signing into Google+. (Ugh.) The rest of the action happens inside your choice of Safari or Chrome mobile browsers. It’s a pretty unsatisfactory method, since it’s really no less work than going straight to the Photowall website. At the very least, Google could have integrated the browser, eliminating some of the confusion caused by jumping outside of the app.

That disappointment aside, Photowall is a fun way for a group of smartphone or tablet users on the same Wi-Fi network to work together on a collaborative photo gallery. After one user starts a Photowall, others join with a five-letter code displayed on the television; Chrome users on Mac or PC with the Chromecast extension (desktop Safari isn’t supported) can also start a Photowall, but won’t be able to join one already in progress.

After snapping a new photo or adding one from the device, you can crop it, add colorful doodles, or create captions. However, the resulting text can’t be resized, and can only be shifted vertically up or down—unlike in the Chrome desktop browser, where it can be manipulated anywhere on the photo. When finished, Photowall optionally creates a YouTube video as a digital memoir, which is a good thing since there’s no way to save the actual mosaic once it’s closed. But make sure to check this option from the beginning, as you can’t do it once you’ve already started.

The bottom line. Photowall for Chromecast enables cheap party fun with friends, but Google really needs to integrate the service into the actual app.

Scrabble and poker may seem like an unlikely pair, but the two have joined forces in Words & Cards, a new free-to-play puzzler from Ayopa Games. The result is unique to be sure—a colorful blend of vocabulary and card-playing that provides a few engaging sessions of casual, online head-to-head play. Over time, unfortunately, it becomes evident that Words & Cards lacks any real sense of depth or replayability. Like a beta still in its testing phase, this game sadly feels incomplete.

The former portion of Words & Cards’ titular blend is loosely based on Scrabble and its ilk, requiring players to build dictionary words from 11 randomly drawn letter tiles. Once words are played and points tallied, the game moves into the latter phase, and each player draws a number of cards determined by the quality of their respective previously played word. Using the standard rules of poker, you’ll finally lay down your best card combination—pairs, straights, and flushes—and points are tallied once again. The player with the highest score after five rounds of this is deemed the victor.

Intriguing as the pairing may be, the connection between words and cards here proves a weak one. Although your hand is roughly determined by the words you play, the poker component of Words & Cards seems tacked-on and unessential. Without bluffing, betting, or any sort of chat feature, it doesn’t really feel like poker at all. There’s a currency system in place, mostly to encourage in-app purchases, but wagering occurs at the start of each game, not between hands or rounds.

The most frustrating aspect of Words & Cards is that there’s no time limit. Not only does this allow for cheating (our opponents commonly played uncommon and clearly searched-for words like “zibeth” and “qophs”), but it also does nothing to prevent players from taking days or even weeks to make a move. This, combined with a limit on your number of active games, opens up the very real possibility of not being able to play at all when your matches aren’t moving forward. Other elements, like a repetitive soundtrack and the requirement to sign in through Facebook, provide other irritating quirks. Loading times are painfully slow during peak server hours, as well, and occasionally the app is simply unresponsive. Also, the game curiously does not track your stats in any way.

The bottom line. The founding concept behind Words & Cards is certainly unique, but a novel idea isn’t a substitute for good puzzle design and fun features.

Of all the things our iOS devices have made obsolete, we’re least nostalgic about our checkbooks. With fast, secure apps for each of our banks and robust spending trackers like Mint and BillGuard, we’ve ditched the pencil-and-paper method for good and become more fiscally responsible as a result.

As an iPhone app, Next took the checkbook model and turned it on its head, collecting your transactions and displaying them as a gorgeous picture of your financial trends. Now, developer noidentity has brought the spending tracker to the iPad as its own paid companion, and while the minimal concept works well enough on the larger screen, we have a tough time recommending a double-dip here.

Like the iPhone version, Next for iPad has a simple, clean aesthetic. Adding a new expense is as easy as tapping the plus button that appears in the top-right corner of every screen, which brings up a grid of 27 identifiable icons to denote the transaction type. The different symbols cover a lot of ground, but we wouldn’t mind a bit of customization.

Next is currency-agnostic, so its main focus is on numbers, not conversions. There are no budgeting tools, per se, but the app arranges purchases in ways that naturally highlight areas that may be draining your wallet. The data is presented differently and proves somewhat less useful at a glance than in the iPhone version—we particularly missed the handy week view—but the two apps work very well as companion pieces, updating quickly and effortlessly via iCloud. Next’s unique interface uses the iPad’s larger screen mostly to its advantage, but the inability to use it in portrait mode is a bit of an annoyance, as is the complete lack of automation, including simple shortcuts like recurring payments.

The bottom line. Much as we like Next for iPad, it’s a tougher recommendation as a standalone purchase than the handier and more robust iPhone version.

At some point in the ‘90s, every college dorm had a Magnetic Poetry set stuck to the front of someone’s mini-fridge. Verses might have been limited to the few dozen tiles that hadn’t fallen behind the vent cover, but the fun wasn’t in creating Walt Whitman-worthy masterpieces—it was in seeing how your creation was twisted by other people. Magnetic Poetry eventually went out of fashion, but FridgePoems looks to bring it back. However, while there may be a certain sense of nostalgia evoked here, the digital representation loses quite a bit of the fun without the kitsch and collaboration of the original.

True to its name, FridgePoems’ canvas is a customizable refrigerator door. The relatively small workspace is dwarfed by the giant pasteboard that holds all of the unused words, and finding a specific tile requires a good deal of scrolling and swiping. When we found a word we wanted, however, it instantly responded to our touches, making it easy to cobble phrases together on the screen.

There are several packs of words available to choose from: two are available upon download, four others are unlockable, and the final six are available for purchase. Each time you select a new set, your current project is erased and the words are shuffled, which can be frustrating if you want to build upon what you’ve already created. Part of the fun is in sorting through the various packs, but it quickly gets tedious—a problem that could be remedied by adding the ability to create custom groupings.

FridgePoems encourages sharing snapshots via Twitter or Facebook, but we couldn’t help but wish we could invite our friends to add to our work rather than just reading it. We tried passing our iPad around the office, but it just wasn’t the same without the spontaneous inspiration that struck whenever we had the craving for a midnight snack.

The bottom line. FridgePoems tries to emulate the appeal of Magnetic Poetry, but it just doesn’t have the attractive personality of the original.

As a clear effort to emulate big-budget console shooters like Panzer Dragoon or Star Fox, Star Horizon is perhaps most notable for how true it stays to its vision. It’s a game that takes very little influence from the usual iOS design trends, thankfully eschewing common devices like virtual sticks, tilt steering, or in-app purchases. As a result, it’s a mostly successful homage that shines particularly in its presentation.

Star Horizon serves as a showpiece for the iOS platform, with impressive graphics and cinematic angles as your starfighter weaves and bobs through obstacles. Flight feels smooth and responsive with only slight touches, and it’s easy to get accustomed to steering with precision and flicking to barrel roll. The firing commands boil down to three simple virtual buttons, which feel perfectly positioned and spaced to fire off rapidly when needed, but never accidentally. And the handful of ship upgrades are noticeably more powerful, so earning them feels like an apt reward for past accomplishments. Aiming is given an assist that can feel overgenerous, and with the action being on rails, it can sometimes be difficult to predict your flight path and steer away from obstacles—but overall, the controls feel fine-tuned to near-perfection.

Those expertly engineered controls are unfortunately in service of a bland, forgettable space drama. You’re a hotshot pilot with a healthy disrespect for authority, working for a space federation embroiled in a lengthy battle against—stop us if you’ve heard this one—a plucky band of rebels. It certainly doesn’t help matters that the voice acting is almost universally awful, and the frequent attempts at humor fall flat.

In a clever twist, though, it uses the paint-by-numbers plot to give you meaningful choices. At several points in the story, you’ll be asked to make a decision—and given only five seconds to decide. These have a meaningful impact on both the narrative progression and the stages, since a scenario or your mission could change completely. And to its credit, being able to choose between factions in the conflict proves the old wisdom that neither side has its hands entirely clean.

The stages with dueling scenarios offer up a little more longevity, which is welcome as a straight run of the campaign can be completed fairly quickly. But as a short, sweet throwback to the action-packed shooters that clearly inspired it, Star Horizon is a success.

The bottom line. Star Horizon is a tightly responsive, beautiful action shooter throwback with only a few issues—namely the bland story and short playtime—holding it back from being a mobile classic.

Replace trainers with keepers and Poké Balls for monster traps and you’ve got Monster Legacy, a game that offers a glimpse of what a free-to-play Pokémon could play like if Nintendo ever took its popular franchise mobile. This means fighting alongside a team of monsters, training them to evolve, and even completing missions for rare items. But before you dismiss this game for another creature-catching clone, Monster Legacy mixes in various clever elements and modes that make it more than just another Pokémon wannabe.

Your mission as the prophesied keeper is to catch and tame monsters to help defend the kingdom of Arborea from incoming doom. The story may not be anything special, but it provides a premise for collecting monsters of various elemental types and training them in battle. With more than 100 monsters to find—all boasting creative names and designs—you’ll definitely find favorites and learn to utilize their skills and unique stats to your advantage. Upon reaching a certain level, some even evolve into stronger versions of themselves, offering more reasons to keep on training them.

Each level you explore has three objectives to complete that either involve battling creatures or retrieving something for a person in the world. Accomplishing each task grants you experience, money, and additional items you can use during your adventure. To add to their replayability, levels can always be revisited to train your lower-leveled monsters, or to complete any objectives you couldn’t clear because you lacked a certain item.  

Monster traps and potions all come with a price tag, so if you run out of in-game currency, you may need to spend some real money to get more. Of course, you don’t need to buy anything to enjoy the game, but having to restart a level, grind for a few hours, or wait for your team’s health to recover can put a damper on your playtime if you decide not to pay.

In addition to simply questing, the game also includes a building mode that lets you expand your monster ranch and build resource structures, which produce potions or traps over time. The experience you gain from completing main game objectives also opens up new buildings to further maximize your ranch’s profits, adding an enjoyable extra wrinkle to the experience.

The bottom line. Despite some freemium hassles, Monster Legacy is as charming as many of the monsters you’ll meet. Its various aspects all work together to create an inviting adventure you’ll want to keep playing.

Anyone who’s ever been stuck at a nightclub, concert, or sporting event with spotty wireless connectivity knows the frustration of being unable to ping friends or family waiting nearby. That no longer has to be the case thanks to FireChat, a free messaging app for iPhone that takes advantage of the Multipeer Connectivity framework introduced with iOS 7. This service allows nearby devices to discover and communicate with each other using peer-to-peer Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, even in areas where an Internet connection is unavailable.

To test this theory, we installed FireChat on an iPhone 5s and iPad Air (which is compatible, but not in full-screen). After disabling cellular connectivity and forgetting our local Wi-Fi connection, we launched the app and entered a username on both. The devices instantly recognized each other, and we were able to chat and even send photos back and forth.

Although FireChat could be considered a poster child for minimalism, its feature set is entirely too basic compared to most mobile chat apps. Everything happens within two tabs: Everyone, a noisy shotgun blast of exchanges going on around the globe, and Nearby, where conversations are private between one or more devices within a 30-foot range (there’s also no limit to the number of users in a group chat). There are also settings for changing the username or toggling off push notifications for Nearby messages, plus a variety of options to share conversations with others. On the plus side, no traditional login or password is needed, and FireChat keeps the conversation going even while seamlessly moving off or onto the grid.

FireChat feels like sorcery the first time you use it, but the gimmick soon wears off. New messages and notifications lack sound, so it’s easy to miss important missives. The app also prompted a random crash of the iPhone 5s used for the review—the first we’ve seen since installing iOS 7.1.

The bottom line. FireChat works as advertised, but out of the gate, the app is more proof of concept rather than a truly useful communication tool.