Yes it's another vertical shooter, a genre that demands solid controls, a smooth gradient curve, the ability to keep everything legible, and to put a lot of graphics on the screen while not having any frame rate issues in terms of stuttering or slowing down of the action. The Visiting of Turjah might not have the speed, but she's got it where it counts.
One of the classic arcade games is Qix, where you have to move your cursor around, creating rectangles and filling up the playing field. Hit a pre-defined percentage and you'll clear the level. The key is to do that safely and not be killed. But can it be updated for a smartphone and changed from rectangles to circles? Bubble Filler is about to answer that question.
Bejeweled 2? After all this time, only now does it get a review? Yep, and that's for two reasons. The first is the rather obvious "we haven't done it yet" and the second is that there may have been many java versions from EA, there might have been a raft of clones that have come close, but this is the licenced Popcap version, with the "HD" optimised for Symbian tag, and given the playing field of the Ovi Store, I suspect this is the one that many people will flock to.
If you’re a budding explorer or have a taste for history, then Extreme North might be the title for you. It’s more than a game, it’s an interactive history lesson. Filled with short text passages and mini-games, you are taken on a voyage of discovery about Arctic exploration in both the 16th and 19th centuries. Read on to find out whether this is one history lesson that can overcome the attention span of the online generation.
Gedda Headz starts with an interesting premise, take a bundle of two player mini games on a smartphone, and pit the whole world against each other in a massive multiplayer game where people can earn reputation, improve the strength of their character (which is, naturally, a head) and buy new accessories and heads to help in the game. Give it all some balance, so new players can have a fair crack at the whip if challenged by an old-timer, and then roll it out as a huge social network/game hybrid. And it almost works.
Imagine a world where you had to get to the exit. A world of squares in a grid. A world where you could never set foot on the grid but have to create safe havens by pushing over tower blocks. That's the world of Ming Zhu.
Zen-like puzzles? Chill out? Casual and fun? Yes, the flavour text for Escape certainly appeals to me. The game itself does deliver, but with a few quirks and one gotcha in the game design. I wouldn't say it's zen, but it's certainly a relaxing and slow paced little number that I'm enjoying.
Developers SwanAngel promise a lot in the Ovi Store description of their latest game: "[IronPlane] is a arcade shooter where you take control of a advanced aircraft and fight aliens in different worlds." If only they could design an arcade game that's as slick and skilled as their copywriters, they might have a hit on their hands.
What happens if you decide to make a mobile version of Worms? By that, I don't mean you simply transpose the code from a platform version to the device, with everything intact (see here), because while you have a perfect copy of the game, it's not been designed with a mobile user in mind. But that's about to change with Jelly Wars.
Not content with creating the rather super Real Golf 2011 HD, Gameloft has come up with a quirky sister game. Let's Golf! 2 HD takes the same golf engine, morphs the graphics into a trademark cartoon/manga style, adds outrageously themed hole designs and even endows each of the 8 different golfers with special powers.... The result is still golf, but not quite as you're used to seeing it. On the other hand, there are core improvements here and enough eye candy here to give you cavities!
