Category: Reviews-HowTos

Crystal Dynamics’ Tomb Raider reboot (newly ported to Mac by Feral Interactive) is a game about searching: for ancient relics, forgotten tombs, and undisturbed grottoes, yes, but also for the self-assurance necessary to transform from a shy archaeologist into a brutal killing machine. Lara Croft’s baptism in blood — her own and, often, her enemies’ — takes place on a fictionalized Yamatai, a hidden Japanese island full of pristine forests, snowy mountain ranges, and a sect of violent cultists who worship the shaman-queen Himiko.

The first several hours on Yamatai are tense and painful: shipwrecked, alone, and impaled by a piece of stray rebar (the first of many graphic injuries she’ll sustain during her sojourn), Lara searches for food and shelter before taking her first human life defending herself from a disturbingly touchy-feely scavenger. Tomb Raider’s introspective sobriety doesn’t last, though: it soon turns into a full-scale action-adventure, complete with gunfights, explosions, and undead samurai. The combat is fun, but the game never thematically recovers from the abrupt tonal shift and exaggerated body count.

Tomb Raider is at its best when its focus is on climbing and exploration. Each area of the island is dense with nooks and crannies, extensive cave systems, and sprawling vistas, hiding any number of collectible ceremonial fans or tribal masks. Lara has an armory of climbing tools at her disposal, but it’s the sheer wealth of ledges, handholds, rock faces, rooftops, and zip lines that give Tomb Raider its sense of wonder and momentum. It’s easy to get lost in the simple joys of traversal and movement, and the game’s action sections — a chase scene set in a burning temple, for example — greatly benefit from the solid framework of Tomb Raider’s climbing mechanics. 

When fighting becomes necessary, it’s anarchic and desperate: Lara can’t shoot from the hip, has limited melee options, and her dodge-rolls are graceless and haphazard. There’s a sense of unwieldiness to Tomb Raider’s mechanics that gels with Lara’s revised origin story, but extended fight sequences dominate the second half of the game and wear out their welcome. With Tomb Raider’s eye for dramatic camera work and punchy set pieces, Crystal Dynamics could have cut half of the fight scenes and still come out with an action-packed game. Thankfully, Lara’s stealth abilities are both safer and more satisfying, the chaos of battle replaced with the sharp twang of a taut bowstring.

Curiously, the traditionally single-player Tomb Raider sports full-featured multiplayer options as well. Paired with a full compliment of modes, characters, and unlockable upgrades, Tomb Raider’s loose combat makes multiplayer combat frenetic and chaotic, but it’s competently executed and fun. Good luck finding matches, though: the multiplayer is Mac-to-Mac only — plus the Mac App Store version doesn’t offer it at all — and just a couple weeks out from release, the servers are deserted.

The bottom line. Tomb Raider doesn’t always play to its strengths, but even its weakest moments display a developer with a keen eye for fusing stealth, exploration, and gunplay. Most series would do well to be rebooted in such fine fashion.

Tablet DJs have long been happy with the two primary players in that sandbox: Native Instruments’ Traktor DJ and Algoriddim’s djay, the latter of which launched a stellar sequel not long ago. Both are digital spinning powerhouses, but carrying around a large library of music has always been a limiting factor for covering all potential sonic bases. That’s where Pacemaker is trying to carve out a unique niche: it’s the only iPad DJ software that comes with Spotify support.

The interface is streamlined and colorful, which makes spinning and scratching a blast, especially for casual and first-time spinners. The waveform display for the two loaded tunes is a simplistic, low-res affair, however — nothing like the accurate waveform display seen in other top DJ apps. The beat sync feature works reasonably well, but we found that Pacemaker is a little less than spot-on with detecting the native BPM (beats per minute) of loaded music.

Pacemaker’s base version is free, with in-app purchases for the audio effects sold either piecemeal or as a $10 bundle (which saves you a couple of bucks), plus you’ll need to have a Spotify Premium account to tap into that streaming service’s immense library of music. The six effects options vary tremendously in quality – the Beatskip and Loop effects are cool and useful, for example, while the Reverb and Echo are cheesy and muddy. At $1.99 apiece, you can pick and choose, and there’s even an interactive preview for each one in the app.

We were a bit perplexed and unhappy to find that much of our iTunes music library showed up as unavailable to use, while those same tracks worked just fine in Traktor. There’s no direct Dropbox support for bringing in your own music, nor does Pacemaker work with any of the iOS tools for moving audio data between apps, meaning that serious musicians will find the software of limited appeal. On the other hand, Spotify fans’ wishes have been granted with this release, though be aware of the fact that you’ll need a live Internet connection to use this key feature, and you won’t be able to record your performances (making the Record feature largely useless).

The bottom line. While Pacemaker is easy on the eyes, it pays the price in limited functionality and music file support outside of Spotify. If you primarily intend to mix your own tracks, look elsewhere for better effects and more precise mixing tools.

Kahuna is a tactical, one-on-one board game about controlling island territories. The physical boxed set, originally published in 1998 and still available today, doesn’t look like much – a modest deck of cards, a few plastic pieces, and a minimalistic game board. But what initially appears to be a simple game of token placement quickly reveals itself as a meditative test of strategy. USM’s universal iOS version of Kahuna not only capitalizes on this clever design, but also adds a distinctive thematic flavor to the experience.

The game’s back story tells of two magical priests in friendly competition. In order to determine whose magic is stronger, they’ve faced off in a game to connect uninhabited islands by summoning bridges. Whoever controls the most islands by the end of the competition wins. Each game card, which depicts a specific island, can be played to summon a bridge adjoining that respective island. Alternatively, you can play two cards to destroy an opponent’s bridge. If at any time you control more than half of an island’s bridge slots, you place a point token on that island. Points are tallied after each of three rounds, and games typically take less than 15 minutes.

What makes Kahuna so tactical is that island tokens are incredibly difficult to protect. Your opponent can destroy any and all of your plans in a single turn, so anticipating future moves is a must. While chance is inherently a factor in any card-drawing game, Kahuna rewards thoughtful moves far more than a lucky draw. The iOS version offers a 12-tier single-player campaign that gradually increases in difficulty, and while outsmarting the game’s A.I. isn’t impossible, the computer rarely makes errors, if ever. Expect to lose often. Online multiplayer is available and mostly stable, but local, pass-and-play multiplayer is curiously nowhere to be found.

One of the game’s biggest delights is its tranquil sound design. Ambient ocean splashes and chirps of island birds – elements not present in the physical board game – provide a welcome contrast to Kahuna’s challenging gameplay. Unfortunately, no amount of tranquil sound effects can counter the fact that minimizing the Kahuna app during single-player mode almost always resets your game, and we noticed odd instances where the final game score was miscalculated.

The bottom line. Minor technical issues aside, Kahuna is a flavorful reintroduction to a 16-year-old game of Hawaiian-themed stratagem.

The loss of Google Reader and the dawn of Flipboard-style news apps have tested the resolve of many RSS fans, but at least one champion for the medium hopes to change the way we read news on our iPhone with “a little peace each day through quiet, careful reading.” That’s the lofty philosophy behind Unread, an RSS-based reader app that promises to “surprise and delight” users. Unfortunately, the first part of that equation came with the realization that there is no native iPad support – a shame considering that’s where the bulk of my reading is done, aside from perusing a few headlines while on the go.

Setting aside that head-scratcher, Unread is an otherwise capable solution for consuming RSS feeds in the palm of your hand. The app does require syncing via Feedly, FeedWrangler, or Feedbin — there’s no support for standalone feeds, although the developer promises additional service options with future updates. Feeds are presented in unread, all, or saved article views, as well as category and subscription groups — a nice touch when you want to quickly jump into a specific item. Individual entries appear with the full headline and a preview of the first paragraph, which can be handy for skimming, but Unread doesn’t offer a list view for rapid-fire consumption — a reading style the app clearly wasn’t designed for in the first place.

While full-screen reading makes a big difference on the small screen, the gesture-based navigation sometimes makes simple tasks more cumbersome than necessary. While there’s an option to mark articles read as they’re opened, doing so with an entire list of feeds requires an awkward swipe left to access Mark All As Read. Unread does hold promise with features like background sync, extensive sharing options, and day or night (my own favorite) reading themes, and the inclusion of a built-in web browser that retains its own history is also a nice touch.

The bottom line. While Unread checks off most of the required features for any good RSS reader, some awkward navigation and the lack of a native iPad version make it a cautious recommendation for now.

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.

Even if you’ve mastered the four-finger gesture and learned to use Spotlight search and multitasking like a pro, shortcuts on the iPad are a far cry from the ones we use on our Macs. When it was released in mid-2012 for the iPhone, Launch Center Pro promised a better way to navigate between apps, utilizing URL schemes to unlock the hidden shortcuts our favorite apps already use to make calling, texting, and emailing seem so seamless.

Now that Launch Center Pro has arrived on the iPad, we can finally unleash its full power. With a familiar interface and a tremendous library of supported apps, the productivity app feels right at home on the larger screen, even if it doesn’t always take advantage of it.

Users of Launch Center Pro for iPhone will need no introduction to the new iPad incarnation — so much so that they might think they’re using a scaled-up version. A familiar grid of squares is ready to record your shortcuts, and it all works exactly as it does on the smaller screen, with the same built-in Action Composer making it just as easy to customize your screen. Dropbox syncing lets you import any actions or groups you’ve created on your iPhone, though its usefulness is hit-or-miss due to differences in URL schemes between the two types of apps. Like the iPhone version, you can choose to replace Apple’s keyboard with Fleksy’s excellent alternative for any action that requires typing.

Launch Center Pro makes itself very comfortable on the larger and more powerful iPad, but we would have liked it to utilize the extra real estate more fully. Its 20-square grid adds room for just five extra actions over its iPhone counterpart —  a disappointing waste of pixels, particularly for an app that charges a separate entry fee from the iPhone release. We also wish there was a way to set the Fleksy keyboard as the default for all actions.

The bottom line. Launch Center Pro is very good on the iPad, but it stops short of blowing us away.

On the surface, Paper looks a lot like what might have happened had Facebook invented Flipboard before Flipboard got the chance, and then slapped on a moniker rather too similar to an existing hugely popular (but entirely different) iOS app. Move beyond the snark, though, and you realize something surprising: Paper makes using Facebook almost pleasurable again.

Facebook on desktop ceased to be fun a long time ago, and even the once-streamlined mobile app is increasingly full of cruft. The idea with Paper appears to be to strip everything back, bring stories to the fore, and turn the Facebook experience into a kind of edited newspaper.

The screen is split in half: the top is filled with bold images, and a scrollable feed runs underneath. Tapping a story zooms it to full-screen, which is just as well given the eye-squintingly tiny text in the feed. You can then tap a link to open the story in a full-screen browser; a share button at the bottom-right provides options to share the story, copy its link, open the page in Safari, or send the content to a user-defined read-later service.

By default, your own Facebook feed is loaded, but you can add broadly defined sections (“Tech,” “Planet,” “Pop Life,” and so on) full of stories picked by editors. Everyone sees the same thing, thus Paper lacks the granularity of Flipboard. There’s no means to define a single Facebook user or publication as a section, for example, but the no-nonsense approach means that the app is simple to set up and browse. Standard Facebook notifications and messages are also accessible from within the app.

The design perhaps needs to settle down a bit — it’s largely intuitive, but very reliant on gestures. These sometimes clash with iOS 7, and horizontal swipes on the large images at the top of the screen perform different actions depending on context. We expected them to navigate through big photos, but on the main feed they switch sections, and in a single person/organization’s Facebook feed, they navigate the timeline on a month-by-month basis. Also, whoever decided people would want to “explore” high-res images by tilting a device around like a crazy person needs someone to give them a very stern look.

The bottom line. Minor grumbles aside, Paper is a good start to Facebook’s news-oriented ambitions. Flipboard is still a better bet for browsing a set of articles you’ve carefully curated yourself, but Paper’s simpler to get started with, focused, and pretty great for browsing Facebook itself.